Gigabyte cheap Solid Satate Harddrive

[Butcher]

It partly so that if an app needs a lot of memory it can get it quickly. If everything is resident in ram and you have say 50mb free and you start an app requiring 100mb you're going to thrash the pagefile a lot. If you have 100mb paged so 150 mb free then it can immediately allocate the ram. Generally windows tries to only page out unused or infrequently used pages so you shouldn't notice a huge impact of having paged data.

[Scarlet Infidel]

fair enough, then surely using solid state memory would for a page file would be a waste anyway. Wouldnt a seperate cheap hard drive be sufficient? I would have thought specific apps and the os would benefit the most (obviously the os would have to be entirely backed up though).

On a side note does anyone know how fast non volatile memory is relative to hard drives, like the type used in flash media?

[Rave]

Well that article you linked to rave is not really proper testing, infact their methods of testing are laughable.

How so? Do you think those error results were spurious then and that the data was in fact 100% intact?

[arthurleung]

fair enough, then surely using solid state memory would for a page file would be a waste anyway. Wouldnt a seperate cheap hard drive be sufficient? I would have thought specific apps and the os would benefit the most (obviously the os would have to be entirely backed up though).

On a side note does anyone know how fast non volatile memory is relative to hard drives, like the type used in flash media?

If you don't need the fast access time or STR of the ram drive you won't need it. No one said you must have a ram drive for page file.

Non-volatile memory should max at around 20MB/s, unless you want to RAID them so they can read faster. The only problem is those memory have limited write cycle, If you are not using the disk very often, you're fine, but if you write all the time (like a database server), your disk will have bad sector within a few months of operation, and you'll as well lose data due to write error.

"Shame they didnt use the the standby line on the ATX cable, then so long as your PC was plugged in to the mains you'd be fine.."

They couldnt really. The standby line on most PSUs only supplys 1-2A and with 4 sticks of ram, itll probably use 0.5-1.5A or more.

A PSU for it would only cost about £5-10 for me to make. Its gonna be easy to add one for anyone that feels like it. I think instead of a battery, they should have included a DC power jack on the back and a plug-in psu. They only cost a few quid.

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to make one of these -its the first DDR based one Ive seen. There have been SDR based ones before, offering not much advantage over a normal HDD.


Its a bit of a stupid design to use a DDR->SATA converter.

As its on a pci card of its own, I would have assumed it would have its own IDE controler that is capable of decent bandwidth and not need an external sata.

The perfect solution would be a mem controler/IDEconverter in the same chip, specially for this application also capable of 3gb/s bandwidth and on PCI-express 4x bus. I dont think any company is mass producing them which is why gigabyte had to go with the simpler solution.

What percentage of computer have PCI-express 4X bus? Only limited server boards. MSI and DFI's motherboards only have 2X lanes on their 4X Slot.

I'd say fitting in a high-end RAID adapter will have more use of the 4X slot than a ramdrive. The 4X slot is simply too valuable to lose to the ram card.

On the other hand MOST computers have UNUSED PCI slots. No one mass-produced a ram drive before so the technology should be a bit outdated. I doubt they have DDR to SATA-300 chips developed.

They could actually make a quarter-height 3.5" RAMDRIVE "BOX" to fit the 4 sticks, powered by a molex plug. It would be much better than a PCI-powered solution.