[aeaa3]

Is this for real? The store, which looks pretty amateurish, has no products for sale ("out of stock") and the prices are vastly too good to be true.

DDR3 memory for 40c per gigabyte? Cheapest I can see on Amazon is 5 times that. 256GB of memory (plus the board itself) for $280? Not possible.

Sorry, I don't believe it.

[farkanoid]

Something seems a bit dodgy. The about page shows the top and bottom PCB layouts without any RAM sockets, only dozens of DDR RAM ICs soldered directly to the back of the card.

...Which would be fine, had I not stumbled upon (what seems to be) the original project[1], in Russian no less.

The blog shares the same block diagram, images and DDR PCB layout. There are no DDR RAM slots. Further, the slots are through-hole and not SMD, you wouldn't be able to attach a heatsink directly to the back of the card as shown in the images.

[1] https://habr.com/ru/post/567742/

[rincebrain]

That doesn't seem to be the original, given that Google Translate translates the top of the article as "originally posted by" with a link to ddramdisk.tech, which 404s now, but originally [1] did not.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20210714152011/https://ddramdisk...

[rasz]

>using refan DDR memory...Kllisre, ZIFEI, TANBASSH, Rasalas etc. use the refan chips

"refan" I think they might be talking about factory reject recycled/repaired ram. Chuck Peddle (6502) had some patents for this and ran operations in Asia for a company doing this on a large scale "Memory module assembly using partially defective chips" https://patents.justia.com/patent/6119049 https://patents.justia.com/patent/RE39016

Oral History of Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

>Peddle: I had a patent on how to use partial DRAM. And we turned that patent into a very large business making DRAM in Sri Lanka, in India, using reject die from Micron.

>Peddle: We buy the good ones in the front, probably about half price because they sell them about half price. Although we buy them less than half price because a lot of them don't make the 50% numbers that other people are looking for. And then the ones in the back, we basically almost get free because we can use them up.

That business died when Micron stopped selling partials(reject dies) to anyone but their subsidiary SpecTech. "SpecTek began at Micron in 1988 as a component-recovery group. In the two decades since its inception, the company has grown from an internal group to a manufacturing division; that experience has produced a product portfolio and reputation that makes SpecTek a leader in application-specific memory solutions.". Every time you buy Crucial you might be buying inferior SpecTek factory remanufactured/patched from defects product.

> We lost 4,500 jobs in a weekend when they stop selling partials.

Nowadays a TON of Chinese brands are into partials. Cheap flash memory was first - why throw away 90% defective flash die when you can make small SD card/USB drive out of it. I have no doubt they moved to ram now.

For the rest, in current chip shortage $280 wouldnt even cover 4 FPGAs pictured on that website :)

[wtallis]

I'm also doubtful that a memory controller with the necessary pin count can even fit under that heatsink. 14 DIMM slots can't all be sharing just one or two 64-bit channels at anything approaching standard speeds and timings.