SSD's Reputation for Failure vs. RAM?

When SSDs first arrived, they were given a reputation that failures were due to too-many-writes to memory cells.

The whole MLC/TLC vs. Controllers, the With & Without TRIM usage - all of these seem to be legitimate issues.

But I've always wondered...

"Why doesn't RAM fail then?"

Does ANY memory chip receive so many Writes and Flushes and Reads and Re-Writes than RAM chips?

I don't think so.

Maybe the Type Of Memory Chip (NAND or ??) is so different that this question is useless.

But I'm curious - why did SSDs 'earn' a reputation for failed memory chips when RAM has - in my couple of decades - never suffered nearly as significant of a "failure reputation"?

 

Volatile vs. non-volatile memory.

Nothing is actually written to the actual memory chips (which would require a physical modification), unlike flash storage. The limited writes is the cost of being able to store data and keep it after removing power.

All NVRAM has limited writes. All of it.

Before SSDs, NVRAM was used mostly for firmware in BIOS which is typically written once (maybe a few more times) during its lifetime.

 

Because RAM never held the only copy of your small business' tax records when it failed the week before tax deadline. Nor did it ever hold the only copy of someone's doctoral thesis when it failed the week before said thesis was due. Et cetera, and so on, and so forth.

Basically, when RAM fails no important data is lost, so it's not a big deal. When the early SSDs failed, their owners learned the hard way why they should have made regular backups of their data. As a result, their feelings towards the failing SSD were considerably less forgiving than their feelings towards the failing memory modules.

 

When the Apple ][GS was a contender they had a battery backed RAM board with its own power supply. If you had the cash you had an incredibly fast "SSD". I lament their demise and the advances we lost with them passing.
Is that option still out there?

 

I believe the RAM drives were actually replaced by SSDs... A brief online search failde to locate an online store that still carries them.

 

Wrong forum for this question.

 

What do you mean?