JOEL JOHNSON — The government has purchased a completely solid-state 2.5TB (terabyte) drive array from Texas Memory Systems, making it the largest all-memory drive in the world. This solid brick of storage is made up of 40 RamSan 320 rackmounted storage units that cost Uncle Sam around $4.7million in total, although it is reported they received a discount.
If your PC used only RAM for storage and no hard drive, it’s not unrealistic to estimate that for most day-to-day operations, you would never have any wait, ever. Not to mention the massive performance increase in swap-heavy applications like media editing and gaming. I’m getting misty just thinking about it.
The only reason for a RAM disk this large is to facilitate super-fast database querying, and Techweb speculates that the Department of Homeland Security could be using the disk to search for Islamic terrorists living in the States. Really, though, it could be used for anything where fast searching through large amounts of data is required.
