Gigabyte cheap Solid Satate Harddrive

[arthurleung]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05...abyte_ramdisk/
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/...spx?i=2431&p=5

4 Slot DDR -> SATA, draw power from PCI slot and with battery backup!!

116852KB/s Average on SATA-150 interface
Using NF4 onboard RAID0 you could reach 460MB/s

If you are using those 2200+2050 opteron motherboard, with 8 ports, even better = 920MB/s !!!

Or a cheap supermicro SATA1 8 port card, on PCI-X 133Mhz, if there is no onboar "luxary", saturate the bus too.

Cost breakdown:
Card approximate retail price 30 quids
4*512MB PC2100 Second hand 70 quids or less
100 quids for a 2GB ULTRA FAST "Harddrive"
Cheaper than a raptor with 100x faster access time and DOUBLE transfer rate.

Only problem is where to find 8 PCI slots (or find custom make power supply for external operation)

[Scarlet Infidel]

Ive been waiting for these to come along for years. Its exciting technology. Hard drives are archaic in their technology so things like this could be the future.

Its a shame that the battery only lasts 16 hours though and speeds higher than ddr200 would be nice. I suppose if this type of thing take off they will develop a seperate interface for it supporting higher speeds as opposed to using the sata interface.

[Allen]

Interesting. So, effectively, for those who rarely power down their PC's, you "could" install Windows onto 4x1GB RAM sticks (or even 4x512MB RAM sticks) and have an extremely fast Windows system?

It would be an extremely expensive 4GB HDD, but with 1GB sticks as cheap as £25 each I'm sure some will be able to afford it.

[Atomic]

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..

[SilentDeath]

"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.

[Rave]

Have a look at this page, then click through to the next page to see the results:

http://www.anandtech.com/casecooling...px?i=1841&p=24

It makes me very wary of using non-ECC memory as permanent storage (e.g. for an OS install) unless there's something I'm missing?

[Allen]

Hmm, so using non-ECC memory could result in frequent lost data or corrupt files within a Windows install, for example? That and the fact that if the power is off for more than 16 hours would not make this a viable option for an OS install.

ECC RAM is coming up as about £50 per 512MB which will make it an awfully expensive 2GB HDD (£230 at least). That is also not a viable option for an OS install.

[SilentDeath]

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

I would be happy with using one of those ram cards *if* there was some way to run memtest on it..

If I were to run an OS from the ram card, I would keep a backup or two on a hdd.

[Kumagoro]

I would have thought the standby line would have worked seeing as no actual switching would be going on in the ram. I think i would prefer to have my trusty old HDD anyway.
surely you could have the same effect by just have copius amounts of ram. Ok you dont get all the benefits but still.....

[SilentDeath]

I would have thought the standby line would have worked seeing as no actual switching would be going on in the ram. I think i would prefer to have my trusty old HDD anyway.
surely you could have the same effect by just have copius amounts of ram. Ok you dont get all the benefits but still.....

If you set your bios to use suspend to ram, it would be very similar in terms of boot times etc.. but it wont be much good for anything else.

Servers will bennifit from this the most I think.

[Kumagoro]

I meant with some additional software jiggerypokerey.

[nichomach]

Seems a natural for a pagefile to me; also servers would benefit, especially database servers that can use a specific drive for cacheing, webservers possibly likewise.

[Scarlet Infidel]

Are you saying such a system would be good as a page file? When the whole point of a page file is for use when you run out of ram, why not just buy more ram. Surely you dont need more than 4gb of ram?

[Allen]

Are you saying such a system would be good as a page file? When the whole point of a page file is for use when you run out of ram, why not just buy more ram. Surely you dont need more than 4gb of ram?

I think there was a discussion on this before, and even though most people now have 1GB of RAM, some have more, the pagefile on your local HDD is still created and used each time you boot your machine. Sticking the pagefile on a RAMDrive like this would still increase speeds a little, though I would be more interested in setting up an OS on solid state, once it becomes more stable.

[nichomach]

Are you saying such a system would be good as a page file? When the whole point of a page file is for use when you run out of ram, why not just buy more ram. Surely you dont need more than 4gb of ram?

Paging occurs no matter how much RAM you have in your system; yes, there are registry tweaks that are supposed to stop the OS paging, but they don't prevent ALL paging, just some. A pagefile on this would be a hell of a lot quicker than a conventional disk-based pagefile, although personally, I'd be inclined to see if I could ditch the battery if I were using it for that purpose - yes, that would mean I'd lose all the data on the disk when the system powered down. That's the point; if the pagefile doesn't exist where it's supposed to when the machine boots, Windows will recreate it. Bingo! No more pagefile fragmentation. Also, I can think of quite a few situations where I'd like more than 4GB; though those are mostly based around either servers or machines doing 3D rendering - another good use; set the working directory for anything that does a lot of disk access to temporary working files to use your RAM-based disk.

[Scarlet Infidel]

Yeh good point, i always forget how reliant XP in particular is on using the disk for a pagefile. For example why do i currently have a 258mb pf when i have 688mb free ram? I cant be bothered to read up on this topic so just ignore me and my ignorance.