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by kjs35 hours ago |
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upvoteby SoftTalker5 hours ago|
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There was never a big market for it because new memory was not prohibitively expensive in comparison to the cost, risk, and limitations of using old memory in a new server. That is not the case now, so people are looking at the idea again.
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upvoteby kjs35 hours ago|
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That's a fair take and likely the answer.

I would counter tho that 1) this isn't the first time there's been a memory price/supply crunch, and "I've got a drawer full of last gen memory I can't use" is kinduva IT cliche, and 2) 'more memory' has always been a pain point, especially with industry practices like chipsets only supporting relatively small physical memory relative to address space (e.g. all those Intel LGA775 chipsets that capped at 4 or 8GB). Oh, and 2a) 'faster disk' has always been a pain point...

But, yeah...obviously my impression of things doesn't match market reality.

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upvoteby deltoidmaximus3 hours ago|
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I think these products were always niche for the reasons parent suggested, I recall their price and max capacity being unappealing when I was looking to make use of a drawer full of obsolete RAM. But since there were several iterations from a few companies they must have sold well enough to justify their development.

They seemed to stop making them altogether around when SSDs came out which probably shrunk the market niche right out of viability.

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upvoteby matt_heimer5 hours ago|
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Not exactly the same but I'm building a NAS box with old parts. Most of my spare RAM sticks are laptop DDR4 SODIMMs. There are SODIMM -> desktop DIMM adapters... it did not go well. The system would boot 1 out of 5 times. No adjustment of memory speed settings would make the system stable.
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upvoteby kjs33 hours ago|
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That's not surprising. At the speed DDR4 runs, PCB design has to account for all sorts of weird effects. Adding the additional traces on the adapter probably pushes all sorts of timing over acceptable thresholds. There's a reason one of the big textbooks in the area is subtitled "A Handbook of Black Magic". [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp...

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upvoteby lizknope4 hours ago|
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30 years ago I remember cards like this to convert 4 30-pin SIMM modules to fit in a 72-pin SIMM slot.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/383521792853

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upvoteby kjs33 hours ago|
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Oh, yeah...I remember those. I prolly have one in a box someplace. They were pretty terrible. :-)
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upvoteby toast03 hours ago|
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My understanding (which could easily be wrong), is the big difference today is CXL which adds cache coherency on top of pci-e.

Without cache coherency, you have to be more careful about how you use the memory and the performance story is complex. Ram over CXL is going to have worse perf than ram on the cpu memory controller, but there shouldn't be any big gotchas.

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upvoteby citrin_ru2 hours ago|
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Old generation DIMMs are not that much cheaper and supply is limited as old generation are taken out of production to free capacity for newer chips. DDR2 is already more expensive than DDR3, likely because it is no longer produced but there is still demand (to replace/upgrade memory in older hardware).
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upvoteby BrtByte1 hours ago|
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Funny how the idea only seems to become practical once you have a literal warehouse problem worth of old RAM
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upvoteby jayd163 hours ago|
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Nvme drives already max out the 4x pcie lanes they get. You'd basically need to use the GPU slot to do better and even then you could do it with SSDs. M.2 break out cards are pretty common.
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upvoteby undersuit3 hours ago|
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Cost for me. I wanted a Gigabyte I-ram but it was too expensive when I only had one 512MB DDR stick after upgrading to 4GB of DDR2. I bought a 60GB Sandforce SSD that fulfilled that speed gap.
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upvoteby wmf3 hours ago|
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Honestly DIMMs don't really fit on PCI cards and a boatload definitely doesn't fit.
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upvoteby reaperducer4 hours ago|
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I have always wondered why there was never a big market[1] for "cheap PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e card you can stick a boatload of your old/surplus/n-generation old simms/dimms on and use as swap/slow memory/ram disk/etc"

Reminds me of the days of JBOD arrays. Mac OS X had built-in support for it.

JBOR?

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upvoteby kjs33 hours ago|
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JBOD arrays are still a thing. They've even evolved a bit (see: UnRaid).
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upvoteby chadgpt35 hours ago|
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They used to exist
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upvoteby kjs35 hours ago|
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Go back and read beyond the first sentence; you'll see I said exactly that.
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upvoteby grepfru_it3 hours ago|
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Kind of. You referenced flash memory. However I owned an ibm ps/2 from the 80s which had an MCA memory card which could accept SIMMs and extend system ram. So maybe the previous poster is being pedantic? No need to downvote them
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upvoteby kjs33 hours ago|
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Yes...I remember the model 80. The cards you're talking about are 1) a design choice IBM made to use MCA as the official way to expand memory in the machine and not something any PCI bus machine I'm aware of followed, and 2) used the same generation memory as the planar memory. I don't think you're talking apples to oranges. YMMV.

I'm not sure where 'pedantic', especially when coupled with 'contributes nothing to the discussion', wasn't worthy of a downvote (which I didn't give), but I'm sure there's a "well, ackshually..." rationale there someplace.

Edit: extra 'not' removed.

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