Gigabyte I-RAM - solid sate HDD!

Richard Dower

:eek: now i read about this before, but didn't take much notice of it. Tell me this...if you populate this with 4GB and it's seen as a hard drive?, can you install an operating system onto the I-RAM?

I mean, Windows XP Pro SP2 takes around 3GB, then your programs and stuff....thus you could roughly have everything installed and running on the I-RAM...correct?

Then you could get like a 300GB drive then for all your other apps and games and movies etc.?, right?

So why haven't folks adopted these I-RAM's?...if it's faster then anything available and has the fastest game load times?, or is 4GB solid state just noot good enough?

po0k

Flash is just around the corner.
2Gig Dimms are expensive (8-slot, 16GB version), and it's of limited use because the bandwidth is constrained by the sata link.

conzy

Custom PC tested one of the ram drives, they dont perform that much better, maybe 50% or so....

Its not worth buying 6 1 gig modules for.

Two raptors in RAID 0 were better than the ram drive they tested, i think?

Capt'n Midnight

The I-RAM is not recomended for your OS because if you leave the PC unplugged over the weekend or the backup battery fails ( they do you know ) then as they say "on a clear disk you can seek forever"

It might be useful for stuff where access time is less important than bandwidth. I'd be interested in hearing of how it would work with either a windows swap file or database.

Don't think it would be much use for gamers apart form the initial loading.

Matt Simis

I-RAM 2.0 and 16GB of reasonably priced DDR I would be interested in. However I get better than I-RAM 1.x speeds out of my SCSI RAID0 array (150MB/s sustained from anypoint in the Logical Drive), obviously not at RAM access times however (>1ns vs 3ms). My SCSI setup was eBay'ed for less than the I-RAM and 4GB of ram too. My trump card however is my SCSI controller has 128MB of Cache. which is DDR directly routed over PCI-E bus (I-RAM is crippled on SATA bus). For small to medium transactions I get DDR access times at 1GB/s+ real transfer speed. Stunning when using QuickPar on Usenet downloads for instance.

Samsung have demo'ed a 32GB Flash drive already, which is pretty fast and uses something mad like 5% of the power of HDD.


Matt

astrofool

Thing is, they should really have 2-4 sata ports on the thing, allowing it to saturate as many ports as the pc can give it, no reason at all that they should be limited to one.

gline

doesnt look worth it at the moment as was mentioned being limited to 1 sata port.

i think u are safe with your raptors for the moment rich

DemonOfTheFall

On SATA 2 it would be soooo much better.

The idea that it could use more than 1 SATA port is excellent too. Most of us have loads of SATA ports sitting idle. If it could use one stick of RAM for each port and RAID 0 them then the speed would be very nice

conzy

They should put another 4 dimms on the Mobo, and have them running at the same speed as the FSB and put a battery backup on them, so that you can install games and an OS....................

djmarkus

Would the seek times not be in nano seconds as theres in no real "seeking" to do? id imagine this is where the big performance boost would be from

DemonOfTheFall

Yeah, but when the data still has to travel down a 150MB a second bus you're not getting all the performance you could.

unklerosco

Samsung have the 32GB flash drive in there new laptops...

Korean memory giant Samsung demonstrated the world's first 32GB NAND flash-based hard drive today during the third annual Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei, Taiwan. The move doubles capacity from last year's maximum of 16 gigabytes.

Like all great new technologies, Samsung's solid-state drive (SSD) merrily thrashes current generation solutions - 1.8-inch hard drive-based devices from the likes of Toshiba - in all key areas. According to the company, when compared to a traditional drive, their 32GB SSD is:

* Faster: read / write speeds of 57MB/s and 32MB/s respectively, compared to around 15 megabytes per second.
* Lighter: at 15 grams, less than a quarter of the weight (61g)
* Uses less power: one third less actually - 0.5W vs 1.5W
* More durable: SSDs have no moving parts; no heads to crash
* Silent: a spinning hard disk generates heat and noise. Flash drives do neither

It appears these benefits transfer well into the real world: a recent demonstration at CeBit pitted an SSD-equipped notebook against a traditional hard drive-based model. While the latter booted in 31 seconds, the flash drive proved its superior read / write speeds by booting in just 18 seconds.

A Samsung spokesman revealed that 32GB drives are already shipping to customers, though individuals were not discussed. The company expects that solid state drives such as this to capture one third of the notebook storage market within two years, though to do so, significant economies of scale will need to kick in.

This is currently the one single drawback of solid state drives: price. High-capacity drives are hugely expensive on a per-gigabyte basis compared with hard drive technology though with a 53% global market share in NAND flash memory, Samsung are better placed than anyone to make this a reality.

conzy

Yeah, but when the data still has to travel down a 150MB a second bus you're not getting all the performance you could.

Yup, if they were somehow tied to the Memory bus you could get 7000mb a second transfer:eek: :eek:

DemonOfTheFall

I think a PCI-Express card, I-Ram with built in SATA2 emulator would be the best. Let the OS see it as a RAID controller card with hard drives attached. That way you get the tasty bandwidth and the cheapness.

Capt'n Midnight

That 32GB flash drive is interesting for the corporate market, since in a lot of cases they don't store data on the local machine so all you need is room for OS , apps and temporary storage.

CombatCow

Theres a good review here Rich that answers most of your questions.As matt says the I-RAM 2 looks cool but i dont fancy having to buy 16Gig's of DDR2

CC

The Real B-man

conzymaher wrote:

Custom PC tested one of the ram drives, they dont perform that much better, maybe 50% or so....

Its not worth buying 6 1 gig modules for.

Two raptors in RAID 0 were better than the ram drive they tested, i think?

yeah read that article there **** tbh