William,
The SanDisks do seem a bit pokey at 16MBps. On the otherhand, you could get 4 of these suckers, put them in a mega-RAID-0 stripe for 64MBps. You shouldn't need to do mirroring with a solid state drive.
I wouldn't count on RAID0 improving the speed of SANDisk's much. How are you connecting to them? USB? USB doesn't support fast parallel data access.
You can get ATA SanDisks up to 2GB. Another vendor I checked out -- BitMicro -- has solid state drives for SATA, SCSI and FiberChannel. I'd definitely would not use USB SSDs -- USB performance would be so pokey to be useless.
Now, if it turns out that 256MB ramdisks are less than 1/5 the cost of 1GB ramdisks, then that's worth considering.
Looks like they're linear with size. SanDisk Flashdrive 1GB is about $1000 while 256MB is $250.
You're right, though, mirroring a solid state drive is pretty pointless; if power fails, both mirrors are dead.
Actually no. Solid state memory is non-volatile. They retain data even without power.
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