Gigabyte Brings Solid State Storage to the Mainstream

[Hirlix]

In an effort to differentiate themselves from other motherboard manufacturers, Gigabyte has introduced a number of interesting add-ons for their motherboards, the most interesting of which is their $50 RAMDISK PCI card.

The card is a regular 32-bit PCI card that features four standard DIMM slots on board. The card also features a custom Gigabyte FPGA that is programmed to act as a SATA to DDR translator, which convinces the SATA controller you connect the card to that the memory you have on that card is no different than a regular SATA HDD. As long as you have memory on the card, the card will be available at POST as an actual SATA drive, with no additional drivers necessary.

The card is powered via the PCI slot, but RAM is volatile and thus if no power is provided to the card then all of the data is lost. In order to make this solution more realistic for real-world usage, Gigabyte outfitted the card with a rechargeable battery pack that can keep the memory powered and data intact for up to 16 hours with no power. After that 16 hours is up, your data is lost, but as soon as you apply power to the card again the battery pack will begin to recharge.

Read article:
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2431&p=5

 

[Stedeman]

Nice

 

[dicecca112]

In an effort to differentiate themselves from other motherboard manufacturers, Gigabyte has introduced a number of interesting add-ons for their motherboards, the most interesting of which is their $50 RAMDISK PCI card.

Price is right, but memory is still expensive, when it takes a 100$ to buy a gig, I can get an 80gb hard drive for that.

The card is powered via the PCI slot, but RAM is volatile and thus if no power is provided to the card then all of the data is lost. In order to make this solution more realistic for real-world usage, Gigabyte outfitted the card with a rechargeable battery pack that can keep the memory powered and data intact for up to 16 hours with no power. After that 16 hours is up, your data is lost, but as soon as you apply power to the card again the battery pack will begin to recharge.

this is dumb and will be the downfall of the card. Prolonged power outages, dying power supplies, and how does it act if the PCI slot is overclocked.

 

[shellshock]

thats prety cool! If you had enough ram in that thing you couod put your windows page file on that. That woud speed up things alot

 

[Bios24]

I think it's an interesting idea. Yes, obviously it's more expensive than a hard drive, but your paying for speed, not space. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a small hd that has nearly instant access? Load times would be measured in milliseconds! Last I checked I could buy 1gb of cheap ram for $75, and it's only going to drop. A year from now you'll be about to buy 2gb for $75.

As for it being volatile, it's just something you'll have to think about when designing a use. ie- make an image on the hard drive, then load it on the ram drive. Overclocking shouldn't effect it as it's getting power from the pci slot, that's it. It sounds like it connects straight to and SATA controller. As for me, I don't think my PC has been without power for more than 16 hours in over a year. And if that's a problem, I'm sure you can upgrade the battery.

 

[dicecca112]

Load times would be measured in milliseconds!

they already are, you are talking to someone that uses SCSI drives and for that matter all drives are rated in ms. Frankly I have beter uses for my PCI slots and for that matter why aren't this PCI-E, better bandwidth.

 

[JCLW]

and for that matter why aren't this PCI-E, better bandwidth.

It doesn't communicate over the PCI bus, you plug a SATA cable into it (look for the red SATA connector in the pics).

 

[ls7corvete]

Im in.

Who has some 1gb sticks for cheap

 

[shawkins]

I'd do it if there was a way to keep it powered full time. If they had a 24hr. battery that would be much better.

Although it is extremely easy to make your own battery packs if you can soldier.

If you made your own pack, a 24hr. or probably a 48hr. pack isnt even out of the question. Depending on the amp draw, just find some large MaH cells and make yourself a pack.

 

[veryhumid]

can't fit that much memory on the board, maybe 4-8GB, and in one power outage, my data is gone (takes much more than 16 hours around here usually ). It might be a step in the right direction. But then again it might not. Memory that loses data without power is not very economical or reliable. Solid state is sweet, though. I wonder if there are any solid state technologies that don't lose their data without power.

 

[VAdept]

Would installing 3dMarkXX on this have an impact on benchmark scores?

 

[sirjinx1974]

Dude, I am totaly buying this card when it comes out. I have 3 PCI slots left in my puter and need I say more? Lets see, 4 x 3 = 12 gigs of solid state goodness. Can you imagine how fast a game will load and how fast a game will play when running on solid state hardware? I get a chuby just thinking about it. I can not wait for this to come out. I have always been fond of small hard drives that spin at 10,000rpms or more so this will be a little smaller, but a hell of a lot faster.

 

[pik4chu]

they already are, you are talking to someone that uses SCSI drives and for that matter all drives are rated in ms. Frankly I have beter uses for my PCI slots and for that matter why aren't this PCI-E, better bandwidth.

You should try reading that again

PCI just powers the card, the access is through SATA.

What I find odd is people thinking 'OMG its going to lose its data on powerdown!" well duh its RAM? I did some research/work a while back into doing this using onboard RAM and a specially modified boot disk which would copy a bootable image to it on startup. Never got to the full blown completion but in small tests it waws really cool. And the last time I saw technology like this it costed 1100 bucks for a 2gig card that DID run thru the PCI slot (was in a Maximum PC Mag a whileback). So this is a neat step forward.

Also I think the person above mispoke themselves. drives nowadays speeds are rated in ms. but RAM is rated in ns. So seek times for this disk will be in the ns range which IS considerable. It would be fun to pick up one of these cards and bench it in SiSoft to see how its speed compares. Might do that myself seeing as I have a good chunk of DDR laying around.

*edit* that being said, having this card be PCI-E or PCI-X would likely improve its speed more and would be a nice to see as an alternative (like multiple versions of the card) the issue would of course be the method of accessing it. Connecting thru the SATA allows it to emulate a SATA drive. It would likely be quite hard to emultate something like that thru a PCI slot w/o needing drivers(which is one of thier boasts). Of course this would be solved by making the card act like a drive/raid controller but would simply require the installation of drivers.

Another amusing thing is. ok this is the OC forums, with a quite impressive grouping of modders, How long do any of you think it will be before someone mods that battery pack into something 'industrial strength' so-to speak? But 16 hours is darned impressive.

As far as memory costs. Well hello? this is a RAMdisk, not a hard drive so the costs arte irrelevant its apples -> oranges but for 50$+70$x2 = 2gig ramdisk(for <300 bucks) Its obviously not for everyone, nothing ever is. I for one will probably be getting one. 2gigs is a lot of space to use if you want to speed up some applications. Obviously you couldnt install windows XP onto it but there are plenty of uses for it.

 

[Stalin223]

This disk will make the greatest Photoshop scratch disk known to man. It will also fix window's stupid cache behavior. I really wish windows would make a 'cacheiness' setting like linux does.

Making a 72 hour battery would be fairly easy. You'd just spend a lot of money on cells. Buy a $.40 battery holder, and solder some wires to it. You can rest it on the bottom of your case, and leave windows on the RAMDISK.

If you really wanted to, you could write a low level program that NTLDR would point to that loaded the image to the RAMDISK, then booted your system.

 

[pik4chu]

This disk will make the greatest Photoshop scratch disk known to man. It will also fix window's stupid cache behavior. I really wish windows would make a 'cacheiness' setting like linux does.

Making a 72 hour battery would be fairly easy. You'd just spend a lot of money on cells. Buy a $.40 battery holder, and solder some wires to it. You can rest it on the bottom of your case, and leave windows on the RAMDISK.

If you really wanted to, you could write a low level program that NTLDR would point to that loaded the image to the RAMDISK, then booted your system.

Pushing virtual memory to this would be a viable option as well. But sadly it still runs off the SATA bus speed. Running it from the PCI slot itself would have been much better/faster. All it is now would be running like a raptor, not too 'extreme' per say. But I guess we just have to wait and see how it goes.

 

[flamerail]

thats prety cool! If you had enough ram in that thing you couod put your windows paging file on that. That woud speed up things alot

That would be how I would use it. It would be rather fast to!

 

[Stalin223]

Pushing virtual memory to this would be a viable option as well. But sadly it still runs off the SATA bus speed. Running it from the PCI slot itself would have been much better/faster. All it is now would be running like a raptor, not too 'extreme' per say. But I guess we just have to wait and see how it goes.

A Raptor pushes about 60MB/sec though the SATA bus, with a really nice low latency of 6ms. This thing will push 146MB/sec though the SATA bus, with a latency of a whopping few hundred nanoseconds. And RAID 0 makes sense for a pair of these, you get cheaper RAM, and a much faster overall sexiness rate.

A PCI slot is limited to 133MB/sec, so no, it would not be better.

Wait for SATA 2 to come out, and you'll see 300MB/sec ram disks. They'll probably be the 'Platinum/Pro/Supar Whatever' version of the card.

 

[sirjinx1974]

Whoo hooo!! I can load Win98 again Lets see, 12 gigs of ram on 3 solid state PCI cards is plenty of space to run 98. Running this PCI card would make my computer very quiet and with no moving parts to fail unlike a hard disk. I can then run my favorite game of UT2004. I would be the first to load into the map Also, win98 does not have that many processes running and it is not prone to malware or viruses. I have been playing around with Knoppix 3.6 live and every time I boot into Knoppix I load as much into ram using the "intoram" command. I only have a gig of memory, but I do notice a difference in speed when loading up a program or just surfing the net. If 1 gig of memory can make a difference then 12 gigs running on 3 PCI cards will be very nice. Oh! If I take out my sound card and use the onboard sound then I would have 16 gigs of space.

 

[evaseeker]

i saw somewhere that this setup have outrun normal sata drive in every bunhmark..

and when you close your pc it does lose its data(they say because although the pc is off there is just enough small current that flows to the pc and this card will take it from there)..

the battary is for power outage or if you unplug the PSU,, and that will only last what maybe 1 or 2 hours till (upgrading your pc or PSU maybe)... so 16 hours is huge.
EDIT
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05...world.com/article/05/06/01/HNxpwindows_1.html

As long as the PC is plugged into a socket, a very small amount of current continues to run through some parts of the system, including the PCI slots. This provides enough power to make sure that no data is lost

If the PC is unplugged, the iRam has an on-board battery for emergency power that can last up to 12 hours,

 

[Dell_Axim]

Since Gigabyte is going to make a motherboard with 4 PCI-E slots (or what the rumors say anyways), it should be PCI-E to take great advantage of the bandwidth.
I think Gigabyte should supply optional software to automatically save the data to a hard disk at power down and reload from disk at power up if necessary.