7 Second Boot with XP to Desktop (I-RAM)

[thegreek]

I found this guy on another forum bought the Gigabyte RAM drive off Newegg and installed XP on it. Read his post below.



Just thought I would share this video with everyone. Boot times are 7 seconds from post to desktop, and 13 seconds from a cold boot (including post and SATA initialization) to desktop. It doesn't get any sweeter.

http://www.upitfree.com/vids/boot.wmv

Enjoy.

BTW: Here is a benchmark from Sandra. It's almost as fast as 4x RAID0 36GB Raptors.

http://upitfree.com/view/538



I cannot wait till the SATA2 version comes out. I'm selling my SCSI setup and buying 2 of them. :attn:

[boris_37]

What are current bootups for raptors in RAID0... does it match this or get close?

If so it might be cheaper for a long while just to keep raptors in RAID

NVM lol

[d94]

jesus

[kayson]

That is sick. I want one :(

[Captain Helghas]

That was sweet. Spent too much on Raptors already to check this out, but it seems nice.

[d94]

the i ram thing is $117 @ ewiz! iv seen gig stix of ddr for as cheap as $50..hmm so for about $350 u can have a 4gb ramdrive haha
if i did this, id get just 2 sticks = enough to cover OS

[Tebore]

I'm sorry but that's not impressive at all. For the money you spend on it I expect a lot more. I've seen boottimes exactly like that with Raptors.

You should get to overclock the RAM and set latency with the I-RAM that'd make it fun.

[Dukeman]

I have to question the video. What about if all of your drivers were installed? Windows takes a certain amount of time doing housekeeping, like detecting hardware and initializing drivers, that has nothing to do with loading from the drive and it is longer than 7 seconds.

[thegreek]

I have to question the video. What about if all of your drivers were installed? Windows takes a certain amount of time doing housekeeping, like detecting hardware and initializing drivers, that has nothing to do with loading from the drive and it is longer than 7 seconds.
He said he installed all his drivers.

[redrumy3]

He said he installed all his drivers.
from the video looks like he just did a format and well when i first install windows and have just my drivers installed, my boot is just as fast.

[RangerXLT8]

from the video looks like he just did a format and well when i first install windows and have just my drivers installed, my boot is just as fast.

Yup me to.

[diehrd]

I agree it appears as just a windows install...

[kayson]

We really can't know. Maybe he installed all of the drivers and didn't touch any desktop settings.

[greenmaji]

bazx was L33+ enough to PM this link over to me eairler..

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=446967

some of the members here have been playing with this thing since the 5th.. they posted it in the 3dbenchmarking area.. bazx was wanting to test it to see if it helped with benching.. :D

[thegreek]

bazx was L33+ enough to PM this link over to me eairler..

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=446967

some of the members here have been playing with this thing since the 5th.. they posted it in the 3dbenchmarking area.. bazx was wanting to test it to see if it helped with benching.. :D

After reading that, I think we won't see the true beauty of this until they release it on PCI-E and SATA2.

[jcw122]

Yeah like Greenmaji said, check out Bazx's thread...pretty interesting stuff, now only if they made it in PCI-E

[stunt]

Just about any raid 0 system boots that fast with nothing but XP loaded. And with only 3 gigs of I-ram, thats about all you'll get on it. Come out with 30 gigs of I-ram for XP and apps and that would impress me.

My raid boots windows in about 14 seconds with 25 gigs of XP and apps. And thats with seagate sata II's. That only cost 240.00 for 4 drives.

[violineb]

To tell the truth even a 7200rpm lappy drive can boot in a bit over 20 seconds with ALOT of tweaking. So considering this is solid state mem. I'd expect a <5 second boot after POST.

[toddm27]

The cost/gig just isn't justifiable for those speeds

[=ACID RAIN=]

If you got money to burn and have to test the new crap before everyone else, that's cool. Is it something you buy for your gandma's computer? no.

I'm all for the rich kids buying it. If they want a 7 second boot, I'll say "wow" and wait until they get cheaper. No one said it was practical, this is purely for the geek factor.

[JigPu]

After reading that, I think we won't see the true beauty of this until they release it on PCI-E and SATA2.
Given that the i-RAM only uses the PCI bus as a voltage source, I don't think a transition to PCI-E is really going to do much ;) The transition to SATA-2 will certianly help, but I honestly have to wonder how much.

As drives get faster and faster (and lets face it, a ramdrive is about as fast as you get ;)), bottlenecks elsewhere will start appearing. In the boot process, device initializations and the inherent sequentiality of everything (can't load video drivers until card is detected, can't detect card until AGP/PCI-E bus control is achieved, can't control bus until initialization is complete...) are going to VERY quickly cause a bottlneck.

I believe RAID-0 arrays are already pushing this boundary, which is why you don't see the i-RAM doing much better at booting. The only real way to know though is to see if boot times decrease on a RAID of i-RAMs (expensive, but perhaps if two people with i-RAMs are nearby they can meet up and do some testing). Another way of trying to determine where bottlenecks lie would be have somebody with an i-RAM run bootvis and post up a trace. The driver loading times and CPU usage durring boot could provide some very interesting information.

JigPu

[Dukeman]

What would make boot times faster would be a way for Windows to optimize itself for the hardware it is expecting so hardware checking and initialization would be reduced significantly. Anything that did report "here" would be left out if possible and the user alerted. Make this an option for power users so we could get minimal boot times on systems that don't change.