Wafer but no ice cream

[Ruptor]

What ever happened to the idea of wafer memory? .
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sinclair-Res ... SwB1Nf0KrX
We could be running all our code at break neck speed in ram on our computers and not bashing SSDs or hard drives.

[Sparrowhawk]

Wow. Quite a find. Thanks for sharing.

[tofro]

We could be running all our code at break neck speed in ram on our computers and not bashing SSDs or hard drives.

Well,maybe not. The Sinclair wafer technology actually was a designed as a DRAM-based, volatile (optionally battery-backed) SSD.
(Or, you could say, the SSD is the modern implementation of Sir Clive's invention in Flash technology)

[Pr0f]

There are hard disks that are basically fast RAM with a backing storage -flash / hard disk - and some kind of power safe write back cache.

The idea being that all external I/O to the drive is seeing fast RAM to read and write from, but the disk manages copying out updates to the backing storage and also in the event of a power fail, copies out any active blocks or protects them until power returns.

I've seen one of those wafers on ebay before - not sure if they are in any kind of working state or if any info is available for them?

[1984]

Wow. Quite a find. Thanks for sharing.

No, it definitely is not.

Apart from the fact that it is not a QL wafer memory unit [1], but a (btw: damaged) Anamartic solid state disk [2], this item has already been "sold" quite a few times since December, 2020 (ebay item numbers 383846497212, 383849814867, 383863236434, 383897187517, 383908287859, 383909920996, 383912660698, 383923565971, and 383936170014). Especially number 383863236434 was funny, when someone tried to get it for £ 30.00, and the one who finally got it (back) had to offer more than £ 300 just to be sure.

Another fun fact: You can identify other accounts used for shill bidding by the same people because they have also been used for buyer/seller feedbacks.

George

[1] http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/ ... Expansion/
[2] http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/ ... tate-Disk/

[Ruptor]

The point of this thread was not to suggest purchasing a broken piece of crap it was to remind us that we were promised wafer technology 40 years ago and still don't have it. I am sure they could put the cache memory from CPUs on wafer strips and give us 64 bit static ram running at CPU speed that is 100 times faster than current system RAM.