Gigabyte I-ram or not?

[liftedcj7on44s]

Would this be a good investment? thinking about getting one as a boot drive! and buying some value 1 gig sticks, but i want some opinions about it. i saw a video of a pc running this and wow this thing is fast i mean loads windows in sub 10 second times!

[Goshawk]

If you've got the money, and are itching to spend it... why not :)

Just keep in mind ot doesnt come with the memory, so you'll have to buy it if you dont have it hanging around. Also, unless you find a way to keep it charged up for longer than 16 hours when the computer is off, you might need to keep the rig running all the time.

I was thinking how cool it would be to stick 2 of these in RAID 0... sick =P



~ Gos

[liftedcj7on44s]

ok another question. It says it has to be a PCI 2.2 slot. now i know they have tested this i ram on the ASUS A8N-SLI deluxe so i would think it would work fine for my motherboard. Seriously thinking about getting this thing and trying it out. Also the reviews say to just get some ddr200 as higher memory speeds dont seem to improve the performance of it.

[ShadowPho]

If you've got the money, and are itching to spend it... why not :)

Just keep in mind ot doesnt come with the memory, so you'll have to buy it if you dont have it hanging around. Also, unless you find a way to keep it charged up for longer than 16 hours when the computer is off, you might need to keep the rig running all the time.

I was thinking how cool it would be to stick 2 of these in RAID 0... sick =P



~ Gos


As long as he keeps his PC off, but on power, it will be still charged as long as he doesnt disconnects power pluug from the PC.

[Mav2KM]

The battery is only in case of a power outage, even if you got a surge or even had to shut down the PSU just to move some components around you would loose everything, but with the battery no. So its all gravy.

[Nostromo5]

I have a question about this also..
I want to buy two of these and raid them, however I am out of PCI slots
on my mobo, could i put the two cards in a seperate computer, and just run the SATA cables to the connectors on my main computer? the pci slots only supply power correct? so would this work, safely?

Nostromo5

[liftedcj7on44s]

yeha i would imagine that would work!

[eightballrj]

Boy I would love to see your description of that one in your sig.... <<THIS computer uses THIS>> computer as its Ram drive Beaaach! haha.

Remember the longer your run Sata's and IDE's the more bandwidth hit you will see. However up to the threshold of bandwidth loss you will be fine.

Richard

[Nostromo5]

Ok, the plan is to set another computer up VERY close to the master. I will use regular length cables, i think they will reach ok. I will even prolly use the second computer to power all my fans in the master. and maybe even my drives.

thanks guys..

Nostromo5

[JCLW]

Yes it would work.

Most people just get a PCI backplane 'tho.

[thegreek]

Yes it would work.

Most people just get a PCI backplane 'tho.

How do one of those hook up to your MB? I looked at one and see a bunch of PCI slots but how to you actually hook it up to your MB. I'm guessing it's like a PCI extension board.

[JCLW]

Yup, usually they have an adapter card that plugs into an existing PCI slot.

[liftedcj7on44s]

the i ram only uses the pci slot for power and then you run a sata cable to the motherboard. the pci slot is only to supply power!

[adamwinn]

I'd wait if I were you. Sata isn't worthwhile considering the potential bandwidth of pc-2100 (2.1GB/s) would be bottle-necked through the 150MB/s Sata pipeline.

A company, ddrdrive.com, will be releasing a pcie 1x product similar to the i-drive in the 2Q of this year. It even comes with its own external power supply to add an extra layer of security. Even though it will only be pcie 1x it will be 640MB/s, roughly 4x faster than the i-drive. Heck, even if the i-drive were SATA-II at most it would do 384MB/s.

Personally I'm waiting for at least a pcie 4x solution. Until then I will continue to use a ram-disk (http://www.ramdisk.tk/ only $6 for one of the best imho, has free version also.) The only limitation is that it can't be used as a boot-device and releases all data upon rebooting.

I installed our SQL database (for Quickbooks Enterprise) on a ramdisk and its simply amazing :) Some functions that previously took ~85 seconds now regularly complete in about 1.5 seconds :)

[jcw122]

Like adam said, the performance increase is non existant when you use higher speed RAM because of that SATA port, it's just not fast enough.

[JCLW]

I'd wait if I were you. Sata isn't worthwhile considering the potential bandwidth of pc-2100 (2.1GB/s) would be bottle-necked through the 150MB/s Sata pipeline.

A company, ddrdrive.com, will be releasing a pcie 1x product similar to the i-drive in the 2Q of this year. It even comes with its own external power supply to add an extra layer of security. Even though it will only be pcie 1x it will be 640MB/s, roughly 4x faster than the i-drive. Heck, even if the i-drive were SATA-II at most it would do 384MB/s.

Personally I'm waiting for at least a pcie 4x solution. Until then I will continue to use a ram-disk (http://www.ramdisk.tk/ only $6 for one of the best imho, has free version also.) The only limitation is that it can't be used as a boot-device and releases all data upon rebooting.

I installed our SQL database (for Quickbooks Enterprise) on a ramdisk and its simply amazing :) Some functions that previously took ~85 seconds now regularly complete in about 1.5 seconds :)
PCIe 1x is 250MB/s.

So a SATA-300 connection would be faster. Plus you can RAID SATA connections - four of them could yeild over 1GB/s.

[adamwinn]

I agree that the potential for performance would be best realized by a raid-0 of multiple sata interface devices, but to get 1GB/s to be usable, the raid card would need to be at least PCIe 4x or PCI-X 133. So now we're talking 4*i-drives and an enterprise class raid card o_O

PCIe is indeed 250MB/s (overhead included), but it is full-duplex unlike SATA which is only half-duplex. So the bandwidth is 2* 250MB/s - but this is all with the 2bit overhead - The full theoretical limit is 500*1.2 = 600MB/s or so.

(SAS, unlike SATA, is full-duplex, but if a SATA device is plugged into an SAS backplane it will reduce bandwidth to the SATA half-duplex standard.)



A good source on some PCIe info. http://shsc.info/PCIExpress

[JCLW]

Both intel and VIA SATA southbridge controllers claim to support full duplex operation - I'm not sure about the others.

And saying that duplex operation doubles your speed is marketing talk. Sure it helps, but not on that scale.

[adamwinn]

I'm not sure how Intel and VIA both manage that, because to the best of my knowledge the SATA spec doesn't include full-duplex operation.

So lets assume that Intel and/or VIA have come up with their own full-duplex chipset, the SATA chipset on the i-drive would most likely not have something comparable, and hence the system would revert to half-duplex.

Now put that aside, another consideration is the nature of the duplex operations. Via and Intel are probably claiming they have full-duplex because they are sending data on one channel while commands can be sent on the other channel. This still results in half-duplex transfer rates.

I have a feeling that duplex operation when used in a solid-state drive environment will result in quite significant performance increases. Using bandwidth as a quantitator is definitely a marketing technique- Could you imagine what dual-core processor sales would do if Intel and AMD advertised the sum of the cores' speeds? In the same way, implying full-duplex will double 'speed' is a misnomer.

Though it makes sense to talk about bandwidth as a measure of performance. Bandwidth is the key. Not speed. Full-duplex operation really does double your bandwidth and that correlates more directly to performance than most other measures.

The key to storage performance is IO. If you have to stop I's to do O's and vice-versa, you will notice a disappointing loss in performance.

By the way, I just got back an email from the folks at ddrdrive.com and it looks like the first gen. card is going to be 1x because they want it to be as compatible as possible with as many boards as possible. Sounds like a 4x might be possible in the future though.

[sabregreen]

Recently installed the i-ram into an apple g5 xserve running powerschool. Running reports that used to take 27 minutes or so at off peak times took around 12 minutes at peak times. Huge difference. the powerschool data file ran on the i-ram which had 4 gigs. The data file was a little over 2 gigs, around 2.4. However, we had to revert back to hard drive due to errors that have happened twice. Would have kept running it if next week wasn't report card week. More testing will be done after next week.

[adamwinn]

Try it on a software-based ram disk for comparison- I'm curious how the two stack up against each other.

[greenmaji]

Someone needs to test the maximum bandwith of the northbridge Raid functions of motherboards so we could actually calculate how many SATA1 or SATA2(does not exist yet) ramdrive type devises would be usefull Raided together though it.

and a software ram disk (a partion of your system ram) will be held back by your system rams speed (that and the fact that your system ram has to use the same bus as the ram drive)

[JCLW]

On current intel chipsets the northbridge <-> southbridge link is 2GB/s. On AMD chipsets it is your HT speed.

My four Raptors will burst at 400MB/s on the ICH7R.

Eight iRams on an Areca 1220 will do 1GB/s (sustained).

But the biggest advantage to most people with iRams is the ultra-low latency, not the bandwidth.

[greenmaji]

I would think the read/write times would be one of the biggest advantages.

2Gb/s :eek: who needs the PCIe controller then, wahhh thats crazy fast :D

[mortimer]

Looked into this. Several problems:
- Slow
- Not a viable boot solution
- Ridiculous price

[greenmaji]

Looked into this. Several problems:
- Slow
- Not a viable boot solution
- Ridiculous price

-HUH? Its fast..
-HUH? Its detected as a regular SATA drive, just like a HD, boot away..
-BINGO!!

[greenmaji]

Eight iRams on an Areca 1220 will do 1GB/s (sustained)..

But, on a AMD server isnt that the limit of the hyper transport buss?
What platform was he using? *Edit* I went back and checked it out.. they were using a AMD system.. In throry the max for 8 I-rams should be 1.5gb/s.. in other words, they might need to move to an Intel system to do any better (and Im not so sure it would be worth it)
In other words, it might not be the limit of the controller. :shrug:

*edit*http://www.acme.com/build_a_pc/bandwidth.html
Opteron HyperTransport memory bus-interface 128bits-width 6.4 GB/s-Bytes/Sec
In other words, the HT isnt holding them back... what the quack is going on with the bandwith on these things, why is that system taking a 500 MB/s hit?

[adamwinn]

Overhead. Transport bus suffer from at least 20% loss via overhead for stability and data integrity.

So if its not the HTT, working backwards, logically, it would be the raid card or motherboard's chipset that is the likely suspect.

What are the details of their setup?

[Nostromo5]

Ok, I got my set-up running, using the other computers pci slots as hosts for the i-ram. the host computers pci slots charge the batteries on the card when it's off, the
host computer needs to be on for the cards to be used by main computer. what i want to know is, can you run a motherboard with no cpu? I have no memory in the host, and the computer turns on, will the board and power supply still power up if i remove the cpu? the fan is nasty loud, and no proper holes for zalman or i would use one.

Nostromo

[adamwinn]

board won't boot, to the best of my knowledge, without a cpu.

who knows, there might be some kind of 'jumper' or dummy device you could use, but i've never heard of one.

[Joeteck]

Interesting reading....

You can RAID 0 the i-RAM.

link (http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/05/hyperos_dram_hard_drive_on_the_block/page6.html)


Hyperdrive IV picture (http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/img/HD4zoom.gif)

[Valk]

Holy sweet jebus those HD4's are $700-$1000 ram not included =O!

The only problem with the iram is its capacity limit, because it doesnt support larger than 1 gb sticks of ram, but its nice because it doesnt need registered memory.
Seems like a raid 0 would almost be nessissary to make this a boot volume since windows alone takes 1 gb. then you need a page file which is another 1gb which wouldnt leave you with a lot of space for productive installation.

maybe this would better used as a suplamentry unit, one that you pair with a already fast raid setup to use for your paging file. then you could give windows like 2gb of page file and it wont impact your read/write from an already fast raptor raid.

I really like the idea of external raid through your host machine. lots of controllers are out now that have external sata. I think highpoint makes them. but failing that, you can always get 4M sata cables and duct tape them together.

[Kunaak]

I have one, I've had one for about 4-5 months now...
heres what I can tell you about.

when I first got it, I was like WHOA cooooooool.... new stuff, faster stuff, shiny stuff... ooooooooooooooooooooo

then a day went by... hmmm....

a week.... well I need that PCI slot now for my sound card... doesn't fit with my videocard heatsink on there, and this, and my sound card...

then I took it out.

a month, hmm, let me try this some more...

a hour later... eh, ok I remember why I took this out.

believe me, the effect wears off fast.
every single person will tell you these huge dreams of windows booting in seconds, and your games popping up instantly, and never have a slow down ever again... and a hundred other things....

that aren't even close to real.

windows will still take nearly as long to boot.
nothing just "pops up" on the screen when you open it.
your PC will still be prone to occassional slow downs (the fastest hard drive on the planet, won't make windows a perfect OS)

by the end of your first week with it, the effect will be gone, cause your illusions are gone, you realize, it's not much different from any other hard drive, cause it has some severe limitations holding it back...

so you try to imagine a use for it, like using it as a slave drive, and loading a single game onto it...

which does work, but again, its really not any faster then a regular hard drive, even then. Far Cry will still take forever to load a level... so will Doom 3 and so on...

after a month or two, its kinda hard to find a use for it, cause it does take up alot of space on your motherboard, and really isn't as fast as you hoped it would be.

I am a overclocker first, and gamer second.
I hoped to use this as a gaming drive.

on the rare occassion I can actually fit a game onto a single 4 gig space... its never quite as fast as I hoped it would be.

so I really never found a use for it, cause its just not that fast.

benchmarks will show you about 125 mbs constant bandwidth.
with no MS rating... sounds fast.
in real life... its still limited by the slow SATA... and thats the whole problem.

do I suggest one?

nope not at all.

the first week, maybe two will be kinda fun or interesting, but after that, you kinda feel like a sucker... cause you buy into all this hype like "windows loads instantly"... and you find out, no it really doesn't...
so you start dreaming up uses for it, just to make a reason to use it.

after awhile, it just kinda sits there.

if super high scores in PCmark are important to you.
get this.

otherwise, wait for the Iram 2.

SATA2, PCI EX, and DDR2 so I hear...
not great, but atleast better.

[thegreek]

I have one, I've had one for about 4-5 months now...
heres what I can tell you about.

when I first got it, I was like WHOA cooooooool.... new stuff, faster stuff, shiny stuff... ooooooooooooooooooooo

then a day went by... hmmm....

a week.... well I need that PCI slot now for my sound card... doesn't fit with my videocard heatsink on there, and this, and my sound card...

then I took it out.

a month, hmm, let me try this some more...

a hour later... eh, ok I remember why I took this out.

believe me, the effect wears off fast.
every single person will tell you these huge dreams of windows booting in seconds, and your games popping up instantly, and never have a slow down ever again... and a hundred other things....

that aren't even close to real.

windows will still take nearly as long to boot.
nothing just "pops up" on the screen when you open it.
your PC will still be prone to occassional slow downs (the fastest hard drive on the planet, won't make windows a perfect OS)

by the end of your first week with it, the effect will be gone, cause your illusions are gone, you realize, it's not much different from any other hard drive, cause it has some severe limitations holding it back...

so you try to imagine a use for it, like using it as a slave drive, and loading a single game onto it...

which does work, but again, its really not any faster then a regular hard drive, even then. Far Cry will still take forever to load a level... so will Doom 3 and so on...

after a month or two, its kinda hard to find a use for it, cause it does take up alot of space on your motherboard, and really isn't as fast as you hoped it would be.

I am a overclocker first, and gamer second.
I hoped to use this as a gaming drive.

on the rare occassion I can actually fit a game onto a single 4 gig space... its never quite as fast as I hoped it would be.

so I really never found a use for it, cause its just not that fast.

benchmarks will show you about 125 mbs constant bandwidth.
with no MS rating... sounds fast.
in real life... its still limited by the slow SATA... and thats the whole problem.

do I suggest one?

nope not at all.

the first week, maybe two will be kinda fun or interesting, but after that, you kinda feel like a sucker... cause you buy into all this hype like "windows loads instantly"... and you find out, no it really doesn't...
so you start dreaming up uses for it, just to make a reason to use it.

after awhile, it just kinda sits there.

if super high scores in PCmark are important to you.
get this.

otherwise, wait for the Iram 2.

SATA2, PCI EX, and DDR2 so I hear...
not great, but atleast better.

That sounds disappointing. Hopefully, IRAM2 is much better and paired with a PCI-E SATA controller can make more of a difference.

[JCLW]

You can RAID 0 the i-RAM.

Eight iRams on an Areca 1220 will do 1GB/s (sustained).

:)

[SuperFarStucker]

full text above


It had to be said :)

I think a gas tank analogy is apt. Would you consider a tractor trailer with 2 150 gallon fuel tanks 'faster' than a 911 turbo with a 17 gallon fuel tank. Better yet, is a (hypothetical) vehicle which can deliver 3200 cc of fuel per min faster than one which can only do 1600 cc of fuel per min?

[Fferrett]

It had to be said :)

I think a gas tank analogy is apt. Would you consider a tractor trailer with 2 150 gallon fuel tanks 'faster' than a 911 turbo with a 17 gallon fuel tank. Better yet, is a (hypothetical) vehicle which can deliver 3200 cc of fuel per min faster than one which can only do 1600 cc of fuel per min?

Please use a fruit or sport analogy, recent gas prices prevent me from being able to focus effectivly on this example (jk :D)


My 2 cents? I'm anxious to see what solid state products are released with MS Windows Vista. One fo their key new technology performance alignments is advertised as a External Memory Devices or Hybrid Hard Drives... http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/features/foreveryone/performance.mspx

[greenmaji]

@Kunaak.. I have a dream... swapfile.sys

[kaido]

I have one, I've had one for about 4-5 months now...
heres what I can tell you about.

when I first got it, I was like WHOA cooooooool.... new stuff, faster stuff, shiny stuff... ooooooooooooooooooooo

then a day went by... hmmm....

a week.... well I need that PCI slot now for my sound card... doesn't fit with my videocard heatsink on there, and this, and my sound card...

then I took it out.

a month, hmm, let me try this some more...

a hour later... eh, ok I remember why I took this out.

believe me, the effect wears off fast.
every single person will tell you these huge dreams of windows booting in seconds, and your games popping up instantly, and never have a slow down ever again... and a hundred other things....

that aren't even close to real.

windows will still take nearly as long to boot.
nothing just "pops up" on the screen when you open it.
your PC will still be prone to occassional slow downs (the fastest hard drive on the planet, won't make windows a perfect OS)

by the end of your first week with it, the effect will be gone, cause your illusions are gone, you realize, it's not much different from any other hard drive, cause it has some severe limitations holding it back...

so you try to imagine a use for it, like using it as a slave drive, and loading a single game onto it...

which does work, but again, its really not any faster then a regular hard drive, even then. Far Cry will still take forever to load a level... so will Doom 3 and so on...

after a month or two, its kinda hard to find a use for it, cause it does take up alot of space on your motherboard, and really isn't as fast as you hoped it would be.

I am a overclocker first, and gamer second.
I hoped to use this as a gaming drive.

on the rare occassion I can actually fit a game onto a single 4 gig space... its never quite as fast as I hoped it would be.

so I really never found a use for it, cause its just not that fast.

benchmarks will show you about 125 mbs constant bandwidth.
with no MS rating... sounds fast.
in real life... its still limited by the slow SATA... and thats the whole problem.

do I suggest one?

nope not at all.

the first week, maybe two will be kinda fun or interesting, but after that, you kinda feel like a sucker... cause you buy into all this hype like "windows loads instantly"... and you find out, no it really doesn't...
so you start dreaming up uses for it, just to make a reason to use it.

after awhile, it just kinda sits there.

if super high scores in PCmark are important to you.
get this.

otherwise, wait for the Iram 2.

SATA2, PCI EX, and DDR2 so I hear...
not great, but atleast better.

Wow, this is really good to know. I was on the fence about doing a 4 i-ram card x 4gb each setup in raid 0 for a 16gb ramdisk boot drive. I'll definately hold off now. Any idea when the "i-ram 2.0" will be out, and will ram take full advantage of SATA II speeds?

[thegreek]

Wow, this is really good to know. I was on the fence about doing a 4 i-ram card x 4gb each setup in raid 0 for a 16gb ramdisk boot drive. I'll definately hold off now. Any idea when the "i-ram 2.0" will be out, and will ram take full advantage of SATA II speeds?

In order to do a 4 way IRAM raid you'll need to connect the IRAMs to a PCI-E SATA Controller to take full advantage of it.

[greenmaji]

check out the other thread's thegreek, the NB is held back in Intel systems by 2gb/s.. I seriously doubt that its going to slow four little I-ram's down much.. ;)
And I would seriouly look into hardware hacking the 5V off the PSU to these things and set them up into a drive bay to get them off the motherboard, thats just plain silly..
SATA2 would be MUCH better, and I cant see investing in these things untill they have it (heck using old PC133 ram would be suffecent bandwith wise and there's tons of that stuff rotting away in landfills :( )

[Joeteck]

Can anyone find a place selling them??

[thegreek]

Can anyone find a place selling them??
newegg

[Joeteck]

newegg

Thats great! Can you provide a link? I can't seem to find it.

[Spartacus51]

@Kunaak.. I have a dream... swapfile.sys

I have a dream too. A version of windows that doesn't swap to disc when there's still ram available. It seems Kunaak has it pretty much right. This is an amazing device in that it represents the first step in realizing potential gains in the complete switch in how we store and use data. He's exactly right though, swapfile is just another dreamt up use that only illustrates the problems with this thing. The idea would be to replace worse performing devices, in the case of a swap file the swap file is in itself the problem, not how it's stored.