Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

RAM Disks. Basically extremely fast storage using RAM sticks slotted into a specially made board that fit in a PCIe slot. Not sure what happened to the project exactly but the website disappeared sometime in 2023.

The idea that you could read and write data at RAM speeds was really exciting to me. At work it's very common to see microscope image sets anywhere from 20 to 200 GB and file transfer rates can be a big bottleneck.

Archive capture circa 2023: https://web.archive.org/web/20230329173623/https://ddramdisk...

HN post from 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35195029

soon will be able to buy a gigabyte AI Top CXL R5X4. PCI expansion card with up to 512gb RAM over four DIMMs.

There's now a standard for memory over a physical PCIe interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_Express_Link) and off-the-shelf products (https://www.micron.com/products/memory/cxl-memory).

You can do this in software, I tried it a few times with games and just other stuff ~10 years ago. Why would it have to be a hardware solution?

I’m confused why this can’t be done in software?

    mount -t tmpfs ram /mnt/ramdisk

Products to attach RAM to expansion slots have long existed and continue to be developed. It's a matter of adding more memory once all of the DIMMs are full.

What to do with it, once it's there, is a concern of software, but specialized hardware is needed to get it there.

Also battery backup (or at least some beefy capacitors).

Not really needed anymore on Linux with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Zram

for most purposes. (Assuming the host has enough RAM to spare, to begin with)