HEXUS.reviews :: GIGABYTE GC-RAMDISK i-RAM

[Steve]

The cost is definitely a huge deterrent. I mean, does it really need to use PC3200 RAM? Wouldn't this be a great way to put good old SDRAM lying around to good use?

How many 1GB SDRAM sticks do you have, though? Capacity is an issue too.

[Steve B]

maybe if i superglued all 9673 of my old sd-ram sticks together i might make a 1gig stick

[GooglyMoogly]

How many 1GB SDRAM sticks do you have, though? Capacity is an issue too.

Sure, none hehe. But I probably have 8-10 128-256 MB sticks of PC100 and PC133 RAM lying around. 8 slots filled with 256 MB sticks would be a decent 2 GB after all... It'd be a big card, but perfectly possible. Heck, my PC3200 DDR is in a 4x256 configuration too, so...

[bledd]

does the pc just see it as a hard drive? (i'm assuming so since it just connects via SATA) -so you only need your SATA driver to install windows on it?

can do backups using an acronis disc and it'll restore really quickly if it ever does lose its memory

have a spare 4gb of ram (all the same 3200 corsair sticks) and really tempted to get this for my main os (my xp uses about 450-750mb), then i'll use my raid-0 raptors for program files

[Steve]

Yes bledd, it's just a SATA disk as far as the OS is concerned. The PCI connection is only really there for power.

[bledd]

i realised pci was just for power, just hadn't found any reviews that used it as a main os drive

with an nlited os it can fit on a 1gb stick no problem (especially if you move programfiles to another drive)

[dave87]

Haven't read the article yet, but has anyone run these in raid 0?

[timjordan]

I am building a system for a customer and I thought this would be a substitute for a swap file drive I was going to add. This would make photo shop muy speedier no? they use graphic files that are about a gigabyte each and then print it out to a large format printer.
says the drive is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Custra...82E16815168001 144.00 on new egg
I am trying to save them a few bucks by using a motherboard that will still support their radeon 98 (agp card)
I picked a cpu based on what I thought I could budget from www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=438&model2=465&chart=186"]this site.

so far I have a 130$ cpu on pricewatch www.pricewatch.com/cpu/pentium_d_940.htm Intel PD 940/3.2/4M/800/775 Intel Pentium D 940 3.2GHz 4MB (2x2MB) Dual Core 800MHz Socket LGA 775 - OEM + FREE HEATSINK FAN-! CPU ... Read More

this would be www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16813135196"]my motherboard
or more likely www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/CPUSupport_Model.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=2471&ProductName=GA-VM800PMC"]this one from gigabyte With a some matched corsair at 2 gb at whatever the highest speed, then add this ram card, use their old case, the radeon agp 9800 and nice 550 power box. Thats what I am thinking of. I might be making a mistake keeping the agp card, any comments? : timjordan at cheerful dot com

[kalniel]

Yes.. but even faster is to put the RAM in the main memory so you don't have to swap in the first place.

[scottfscottf]

For photoshop use I would have at least 3gb on the motherboard. Set the /3gb switch to allow photoshop to use 3gb of system ram.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system...AE/PAEmem.mspx

I would make the windows swap file a fixed sixe of 500mb on the iram and point the first photoshop scratch disk file to the iram card with the second photoshop scratch disk file to the fastest hard disk in the computer. This should give you the fastest speed in photoshop and other apps. You may have to lower the history states to around 4. Everytime you make a change in photoshop it will save a history state that could be upto the size of the file, so even 7gb of ram & fast storage can be eaten away pretty quickly.

[TooNice]

Please excuse the bump: the recent price drop in RAM has added some of my interest in i-RAM. I realise that the i-RAM reviewed only takes DDR RAM and we'll have to wait for the next gen device to take advantage of DDR2.

Although that made me wonder.. isn't the current design really inefficient? Forget DDR-2, isn't DDR RAM completely bottlenecked by the SATA/SATA-300 interface by 10 folds? So does that mean that i-RAM users should just get the cheapest memory they can, provided that it is compatible (and working)?

Lastly, this is more of a feedback - I would like to see some real world performance in reviews of this nature (OS boot/game loading time and other disk intensive applications we may encounter). Having looked at other reviews on this device, it seems that the use of i-RAM improve the performance over 'reguar HD' in many applications by a much smaller margin than the IO benchmarks may imply.

[dijitul]

All,

I've read your posts, and it's sad that a lot of you (luckily, not all) make reviews or assumptions about products you've never touched or seen in action. Also, with every new product out there, there will always be those who want more and I'm one of those who "want more." However, I do own an i-RAM, and I've tinkered with it in several ways.

Let me start off by saying it *is* blindingly fast, despite that some of you complian it not being SATA-II or DDR2 or whatever the latest and greatest technology is. The fact is, RAM is built upon random-access and hard drives are not. The mechanical aspect of hard drives slow them down except for sequential reads, period. They have to do millions of reads and writes, and those 8 millisecond seek times all add up. RAM, on the other hand, eliminates seek times altogether. File Fragmentation Worries are a thing of the past.

Just to give you an idea, my Windows XP installation typically boots up somewhere around 90 seconds from a SATA-I hard disk. This includes the power-up of the system, booting up to the GINA, loading the desktop, and waiting for that last program to finish executing. With the i-RAM as my primary drive, it completes this process in about 7 seconds. SEVEN. To the desktop, awaiting my next command. Most of that 7 seconds is POST and hardware initialization. (For the testing, I was utilizing Norton Ghost for imaging the drives).

I proceeded to test additional applications, including Microsoft Office 2003, and I put 32 applications in the Startup menu. (I had to remove a lot of unneeded files and reduce the size of the page file to do this test on 4 GB of storage, but on the plus-side Office 2003 took less than 2 minutes to install). I rebooted again, and it took about 1 additional second to load all the those applications AT THE SAME TIME. They loaded so fast, I could barely see each window pop open -- literally blindingly fast. Could it be faster? Sure. Would the difference be humanly discernable? Probably not. Once you change your system disk to RAM, it's no longer a bottleneck, and you'll be spoiled to Hell and back.

As for the comments regarding the pagefile, it doesn't matter how much RAM you add to your system. The pagefile is a necessary evil. Why, you wonder? I did, too. It's NOT additional memory per se. It's part of memory management. Memory is requested by software/drivers/etc., and memory is wasted by those same programs because they usually request more than they really need (it's a programming thing). They all have the freedom to address 4 GB of RAM *regardless* of how much you really have installed. The pagefile permits this fixed addressing space to occur, and faults pages of unused or idle memory to this file. If you turn off the pagefile, you'll just be shooting yourself in the foot. Those programs will simply waste RAM and leave nothing for other programs to use, leading to inevitable "out of memory" error messages. The i-RAM is perfect for hosting your pagefile, along with Temporary Internet Files, TEMP folders, Photoshop scratch disks, P2P temp folders, and anything else that reads and writes a lot during processing.

Now, about wanting more: The improvement which is obviously in immediate desire is MORE storage. 4 GB isn't much, even for plain vanilla Windows XP, and unacceptable to Vista. 8 GB? Could still be quickly filled when including applications like Office, the pagefile, and the endless service packs and patches for Windows. 12-16 GB is preferred. Granted the hardware needs to be designed for 2 GB RAM chips and so does your wallet. But, should they go this route, and should you experience it, you'll realize why hard drives are becoming antiquated these days. Flash memory is free of seek times, but bandwidth is still not quite up there. You'd have to stripe about 8 flash devices to get close to SATA-I speeds. Good luck with that, especially budget-wise.

Next desire would be some sort of live backup. The included software allows periodic backups, but for an operating system it's not enough peace-of-mind. The battery keeps i-RAM alive even when power is disconnected from the PC. PCI slots are HOT even when the computer is off -- as long as the power supply is also hot. The battery is NOT used until you physically unplug the power supply and the battery lasts several hours. Some sort of RAID-1 configuration would be helpful, perhaps a dedicated SATA or flash device to keep a mirror copy on in the event of catastrophic power loss. The disk could just be read back to RAM should this happen while operating in critical-mode, and soon you'd be on your merry lightspeed way. (Does anybody know if RAID-1 will always prioritize reads from the fastest disk? If so, any RAID-1 can be setup with the i-RAM as one disk and a mechanical drive as the second.) This mirror would be kept up-to-date in the background when i-RAM is not answering requests.

And, my last request for an update is an external case or bay-mounted box to put the card in, with a DC power supply. This way, I have the option to use a PCI slot or not.

Now, if you research a bit deeper, HyperOS Systems out of the UK has developed the HyperDrive 4 -- which can now hold up to 32 GB of RAM, has SATA and PATA connectors, is a 5.25" bay mounted RAM drive, and has an option for automatic backups to a direct-mounted flash or 2.5" drive. However, its price is enormous by comparison -- approximately $4200 for a fully loaded 16 GB model, while the i-RAM cost me $380 fully loaded with 4 GB of RAM. Do the math: 4 x $380 = 16 GB @ $1,520. So, with a few spare PCI slots, you can have something worthy of your brand-new quintuple-core 8 GHz extreme processor with a 1566 Mhz FSB and 2 GB cache.

I'm planning to build a cheaper, secondary motherboard-in-a-box with power only (no CPU, no RAM) just to power 3 to 4 i-RAM drives and then use a SATA RAID controller in my primary computer to utilize them all, thus freeing up the space in my primary box and getting 16 GB of lightning-speed storage. The secondary box will be cooled, small, and sit next to (or on top of) my primary computer, with SATA cables running into my primary (or to external SATA connectors if I go that route). It still remains to be seen how the i-RAM might perform as part of a mirrored set with a mechanical disk. I imagine this depends highly on the RAID controller itself, but it's worth investigating.

I hope this information is helpful to all of you.

dijitul

[MilkMan]

This is indeed some good information on the I-Ram.
I don’t use one, but have read articles about it.

I have also heard that Gigabyte will be releasing a new I-RAM (Q1 2008).
It will be a BOX type, instead of PCI interface.
I’m not sure about the specs though.

Thx for the info

[mrt9888]

I'd like to see some real application test; encoding, gaming etc.

[dijitul]

I'd like to mention the addition of another potential contender to this category of drives, one that has belayed my interest in purchasing more i-RAM components. Fusion IO has announced the upcoming release of their ioMemory-based ioDrive, a slot-mounted NAND-based flash drive that will sport up to 640 GB (yes, you read that right, GB) of storage at up to 800 MB/s speeds. They predict it to be approximately $30/GB when released next year, with several storage capacity models. See FisionIO's website for more information regarding compatibility and applications. Let me know if you happen to get a hold of one!

[pauldarkside]

Well, that site can be found here.

At $30/GB, their "entry-level" 80GB model works out to be $2400. At that price point it's prohibitive for most users, yet it's funny to see they list gaming as one of the beneficiaries. Definately a high-end product for high-end needs, or those with fat wallets.

Still, I'd be interested in seeing some performance tests