Daystar NuBus RAM Expansion Board? — #9

Post #9 by trag

Source Forum	68kMLA
Category	Software
Post Date	Fri, 19 Feb 2010 - 17:36
Original URL	https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/daystar-nubus-ram-expansion-board.19909/

Post

And I found this:

By Jonathan A. Oski
The Mac is tackling many tasks that were not thought possible just a couple of years ago, but there are many areas where timesaving improvements are still sorely needed. DayStar Digital Inc. recently introduced the RAM PowerCard for Macintosh NuBus.

Targeted at applications with high I/O requirements, such as raster-image processing, multimedia, photo imaging, graphics manipulation, software development and database manipulation, multiple RAM PowerCards can be combined to add up to 1.25 Gbytes of RAM-disk space. This disk can be partitioned to provide System 7.0 virtual memory, which is significantly faster than that using conventional rigid disks. Also, unlike volatile motherboard-based RAM disks, the RAM PowerCard preserves data in the event of a system restart or crash.

Configuring the RAM PowerCard. Random access memory, which is much faster than any high-performance disk system, can be used to speed up many applications that are choked by current I/O bottlenecks. The RAM PowerCard is priced at $649 with no RAM installed and is geared for those users who spend much of their time waiting while their Mac chugs through disk-intensive tasks. Each RAM PowerCard can be configured in up to 19 different configurations, depending on the distribution and size of the RAM on the card's four SIMM (single in-line memory module) banks.

There are two varieties of the RAM PowerCard, based on SIMM orientation. One with diagonally mounted SIMMs can accommodate 1-, 2- and 4-Mbyte SIMMs. The other accommodates horizontally mounted 16-Mbyte composite SIMMs in addition to the smaller capacity SIMMs. Each card type is priced identically, and DayStar will exchange board types free of charge should you outgrow the capacity of a card designed for diagonally mounted SIMMs.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-11385007/powercard-charges-up-performance.html

So it appears that the RAM PowerCard was a RAM Disk based solution, not something which added RAM to applications memory. Although, one could, using virtual memory.

The thought that prompted my curiosity is that on 32 bit machines there is 1 GB of address space available for RAM. If one was building a hardware hack, there ought to be some way to actually put 1 GB of physical RAM into the machine...

Oh, and this:

PowerStart. RAM PowerCard, the company's NuBus RAM disk card, will gain auto-loading features next month when the company releases PowerStart free to all current users. The control panel lets users create file sets that are automatically copied to a RAM PowerCard's RAM disk at start-up. Users previously had to manually copy files to the RAM disk each time they turned on the Mac.
If a System folder is copied to the RAM disk, PowerStart can reboot from the RAM disk after copying the files. The program can keep a log of files copied, and automatically copy changed files back to the hard disk when a user shuts down the Mac.