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Wow check out this "iRAM" !?

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ps2cho

ps2cho

Member
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Joined
Oct 13, 2004
http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-RAMDISK#
MB-RAMDISK_LG.GIF


I've never seen anything like this before. It supports up to 4GB extra RAM.

I assume it must be very bandwidth limited because it is PCI-E based and not anywhere near the CPU as where RAM is usually supposed to be!

Anybody heard of bought one of these?

EDIT: It says its a superfast storage device! hmm! It uses DDR RAM so you can stock up using old parts.
I want to see some benchmarks of these baby's!
 
If you do some searching around there are a couple posts about this drive. And its not additional ram, it works like a hard drive. Its great because its solid state but the bad thing is, if the onboard battery dies while the power is diconnected from the system you lose your OS if you use it as an OS drive that is.
 
synthetic_fenix said:
If you do some searching around there are a couple posts about this drive. And its not additional ram, it works like a hard drive. Its great because its solid state but the bad thing is, if the onboard battery dies while the power is diconnected from the system you lose your OS if you use it as an OS drive that is.
Click to expand...

It would probably be good for installing a game -- making a copy of the folder -- dump it on that drive and play away. Super fast loading and you have a backup of the game on the proper hard drive. Most games save game saves into the my documents folder too.

I guess this would be most efficient if you had a backup power generator thing (forgot real name) so if the power went off you wouldn't lose everything until it flicked back on.
 
this is somewhat old news and hasnt really hit the market with as much a splash as some thought. Mainly, the limited capacity of the unit and the cost of ddr atm.
I think the idea is great, about time! but untill they release one that works on sata2 *would be the first device actully worth sata2*, using ddr2 beit sodimms or whatnot and has a useful capacity, like 12gb or somthing; it isnt that practical.
 
Ah yeh now I think about it, 4GB can hardly be large enough for any new games....

Well this is a start! Maybe it can be improved a lot and for enthuasts with unlimited money, can buy these for a significant performance boost when they come out with larger capacity ones.
 
I believe the idea now is to incorporate ram into the front end of regular hard drives so that information used frequently would be kept in the silicon memory as well as an automatic back up of the material. The rest would be on regular platters. Then boot times and access to some material would be super fast. It keeps the price down, there is no use having all material on super fast disks when only a fraction actually would benefit from the speed. Perhaps you could even add memory to the system according to your needs.
 
ps2cho said:
That's simply insane. That probably costs $$$$thousands to make!!!

The performance is almost off the charts though!
Click to expand...

$500 a piece, so $3 grand.

I wonder what the real world performance is. Sometimes its clearly the hard disk that is a bottleneck, but given extensive caching where system memory and CPU cache are faster than the IRAM, its not clear how much better it would be.

Games with large data sets would get an advantage, large databases with frequent random access and winxp boot up...anything else?

I have this feeling that system over head, CPU calculation, waits for slow peripherals other than the HD, and memory transfers would take 80% of the time, leaving 20% for the hard disk at most. If so, then you get a 20% speed up, sometimes, it wouldn't help FAH calculations for example, or a database accessed frequently on a large cache system or anything done that fits inside the CPU cache.
 
Yeah I saw videos of people putting xp on it, and the load times are QUICK. As previously mentioned, the only thing sucks is if you lose power for an extended time it'll all be lost. I read that it has an ion battery installed for up to 10 hours without power.

Check it out!
 
Surely would be straight forward to mod a larger capacity backup battery to pervent losing data when you lose power/transport your PC. :shrug:

Far to expensive for what it does though, and IMO is only really for enthusiasts with money to burn.
 
IIRC, it ran as fast as your SATA controller could go (really close to the theoretical max).
 
Moto7451 said:
IIRC, it ran as fast as your SATA controller could go (really close to the theoretical max).
Click to expand...

In that raided iRams on ICH9R on board raid, even 4 of them already maxed out the internal bandwidth of the southbridge it self, it is about 750 MBytes/s.
 
Samsund have a 32gb SSD in comercial production, but it cost around £300 ($600), and all ssd's have super fast read times, but slower write time due to them being flash based. Ram based drives are not so good as they need a constant power supply but the samsung ones dont need that. I think you where talking about a UPS (uninteruptable power supply) to kepp them powered up.
the other problem with them is the fact that reading and writing continously from them wears down the falsh cells and they can eventually fail.
Still, they are silent, quick and the way forward, when they get cheaper.
 
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