SSD drive as RAM?

[Hellhammer]

As you implied, the connection type has a lot of impact on performance. What if we could use SSDs with the typical RAM connection?

I don't think that would help because the controller is still the bottleneck (e.g. Vertex 3 manages ~550MB/s but SATA 6Gb/s should be able to provide nearly 600MB/s).

And is the latency a matter of the memory itself, or the interface?

Well, the type of memory affects the latency (smaller CL and faster frequency = lower latency) but I'm not sure what is the affect of the interface (i.e. what would happen if you ran DDR3 on SATA interface).

Anyway, SATA and SSDs are not designed to be used as RAM so I don't think SSD as RAM would be a wise idea.

 

[WardC]

In the System 7 days, There was "Virtual Memory" that could be turned on in the Memory control panel, but it was always much, much slower with this setting turned on than using 100% actual physical memory, with VM turned off altogether. Nowadays VM is always used in Mac OS X in some respect, but you will be able to load more programs into memory much faster with real RAM. It does improve a bit with SSDs, where I have heard people very happy with the 2GB versions of the MacBook Air being able to run 20 programs at once without a hitch, using part of the SSD as virtual memory. The speed difference, they say is barely noticeable from using a machine with more RAM. I opted for 4GB of RAM on both my MacBook AIrs just to be safe, though.

 

[CFoss]

Volatile and violent are two very different things.

I know... which is why I corrected your mistake.