New technology to speed up windows and games

Billy Kovachy

http://overclockers.com/tips00788/

http://www.tomshardware.com/business/20050601/computex_day_2-06.html#ram_disk_to_speed_up_your_systems

The above links describe a new ram disk project by Gigabyte. It is a PCI card with four DDR1 slots, battery and SATA connection. It works by putting in four gig of ram on the card to create the disk. Then in the PCI slot the battery is recharged for the volatile ram after shut down. The disk is then read through the SATA connection at over 100 MB/s.

What does this mean? Well loading windows onto to it well decrease the boot times the application load times and also game loading. It might also be a dumping ground for your old ram when you upgrade to DDR2 however it will lack punch if you have only four 256 modules in it.

There is also the possibility of getting two and setting up a raid futher increasing the advantages of this card. This card could give a new lease of life to your old machine and best thing is when you upgrade to the newest AMD 64 motherboard or 3.2 Prescott you can still slot this in. Retailing at below 70euros for the card it seems like a good buy. This will be out late this year.

Capt'n Midnight

Forget games - Would be ideal for a small dB server....

just one thing - does it mirror the the HD on the fly so you don't loose data or is just a large RAM drive ?

Billy Kovachy

No. The ram is powered by a battery and is recharged through the Pci slot. Even if the computer is off but connected to mains I think there is power to keep the ram on. The OS is loaded on the ram and is there like a small hard drive with short access times leaving the cpu as the possible bottle-neck for your computer as it decompresses the data. This is only new dont know to much about it. But going to solid state hard drives is the way forward.

Sparky

Yea solid state is defo the way to go TBH, mega fast data transferes

Ciaran500

This isn't a new concept. But it looks alot cheaper than previous attempts.

rsynnott

The problem is that athe battery reportedly lasts only a few hours when it loses power. It's also slower than it might be. It's a nice idea, but I wouldn't be an early adopter.

gline

i remebering seeing a company online that sold their pcs with 1gig PU ram stick on it, ULTRA quick speed that memory is, windows boot times where about 10seconds or less, il look for the link for it again, their pcs cost a bomb though

rsynnott

gline wrote:

i remebering seeing a company online that sold their pcs with 1gig PU ram stick on it, ULTRA quick speed that memory is, windows boot times where about 10seconds or less, il look for the link for it again, their pcs cost a bomb though

This was Liebermann; the whole thing was a not-quite-hoax (they sold computers, but they hugely overadvertised them. Think Alienware, but much moreso). They're now bankrupt, fortunately. See http://plex.us/outbursts/liebermann.html

gline

Was that PUram any good?

rsynnott

gline wrote:

Was that PUram any good?

Their one was apparently a hoax; they never gave any details and no-one ever discovered one in the real world. But these things (hardware RAM drives with battery backups) aren't news; they've been in use on mainframes in specialised apps for decades. This Gigabyte thing seems to be one of the first consumer ones tho.

Redrocket

yeah this is kinda new,
ram drives have been around for years, this is only new in the sense that it's a pci based version, also, im not sure but i think that pci based card version has also been around for a while just without the battery or sata connector

years ago this was unusable because of ram prices, now 4gbs of ram is relatively cheap,
if you google, you can find software that will partition your existing ram into a hard disk

rsynnott

PCI-X ones have been around for a while, for server applications, with and without batteries and disk backups. Yep, the thing presenting as an SATA drive, of all things, is new. Note that this one doesn't use a standard chip, by the way; it uses something that Gigabyte apparently designed themselves running on a Xylinx of some sort.

OfflerCrocGod

Sparky_S wrote:

Yea solid state is defo the way to go TBH, mega fast data transferes

It will also cost 30 times more. You can pay that if you want but I'm happy with my 400GB drives that dont cost more then my house.