iRam 2???

M

mjz_5

2[H]4U
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May 24, 2001
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What is happening with this thing?

8GB memory and a sata3.0 interface is nice.. what's the hold up?

Also, anyone with the iram 1 drive, how do u guys like em? Worth the cash?
 
iRAM 1 is too small to be really useful, in other words: I do not have the required knowledge to use the iRAM1 as a "high-speed non-volatile cache" to decrease load times etc.
 
I already had the extra memory lying around so I picked one up to try it out.

Pro:
Fast swap file = nice!

Con:
Installed OS to iRAM kept losing registry config
RAM modules with heat spreaders do not fit well
Full height RAM modules cause the iRAM to cross into space of adjacent slot
Short RAM modules very expensive
Hard to find an open PCI slot in PCs anymore

And that's about as far as I got. As a matter of fact, I'm done with it... just no space in the eVGA 680i mobo when you go SLI 8800GTX w/ an X-fi (not that it'd fit in the X-fi's place even if I wanted, since it would contact the 8800GTX).

I would only buy iRAM 2 if:
PCI-Express x1 slot
8GB RAM Support
SATA 3.0G
RAM modules oriented so that full height modules don't cross into next slot space
 
Once iRAM 2 is out, I may do two in RAID0. I have access to that type of RAM on the cheap. 16GB of solid-state boot volume? Heck yeah. Vista might even fit on it.

I thought they were getting away from the PCI slot thing and getting into the 3 1/2 bay thing?
 
Brahmzy said:
Once iRAM 2 is out, I may do two in RAID0. I have access to that type of RAM on the cheap. 16GB of solid-state boot volume? Heck yeah. Vista might even fit on it.

I thought they were getting away from the PCI slot thing and getting into the 3 1/2 bay thing?
Click to expand...

Thats what I would like. Don't really see a reason to put it in the pci slot if it doesn't use it for anything but power.
 
canislupy said:
I already had the extra memory lying around so I picked one up to try it out.

Pro:
Fast swap file = nice!

Con:
Installed OS to iRAM kept losing registry config
RAM modules with heat spreaders do not fit well
Full height RAM modules cause the iRAM to cross into space of adjacent slot
Short RAM modules very expensive
Hard to find an open PCI slot in PCs anymore

And that's about as far as I got. As a matter of fact, I'm done with it... just no space in the eVGA 680i mobo when you go SLI 8800GTX w/ an X-fi (not that it'd fit in the X-fi's place even if I wanted, since it would contact the 8800GTX).

I would only buy iRAM 2 if:
PCI-Express x1 slot
8GB RAM Support
SATA 3.0G
RAM modules oriented so that full height modules don't cross into next slot space
Click to expand...

well, supposedly they are going to be 8GB ,sata 3.0g and use a 5.25 bay.. so we hopefully should be good.. now we just need ram prices to decrease
 
That would really be SICK having 2 of these things. I WILL be getting 'em if they are more relaible and are 8GB per device.
 
Even 8GB of ram would be a waste, honestly.

Let's say the iRam 2 is $200
Then you pick up eight 1GB sticks of DDR, to the tune of $100 ea

You've already put $1000 into ONE 8GB drive.

Unless it's just the most godawfully fast thing on the face of the entire planet, then that's a pretty bad investment.

For $1000, you could get one hell of a SATA disk setup.

I'd rather drop $2K into a nice SATA array (320gb drives are on sale lately :) ) and have speed as well as capacity. But that's just me, and I love iSCSI
 
LightningCrash said:
Let's say the iRam 2 is $200
Then you pick up eight 1GB sticks of DDR, to the tune of $100 ea
Click to expand...
Except the Iram2 uses DDR2 ;)
 
LightningCrash said:
I'd rather drop $2K into a nice SATA array (320gb drives are on sale lately :) ) and have a lot of sustained transfer rate as well as capacity. But that's just me, and I love iSCSI
Click to expand...

Yeah, I don't think anyone could argue with that.
 
With 64bit CPU's and OS's you would be much better off just putting that same RAM into system RAM.. then it could be used by programs directly, and you wouldn't need a swapfile.

Also, modern OS's cache frequently used files into RAM already, so again, system RAM should be maxed before you bother with solid state drives.
 
Lazn_Work said:
With 64bit CPU's and OS's you would be much better off just putting that same RAM into system RAM.. then it could be used by programs directly, and you wouldn't need a swapfile.

Also, modern OS's cache frequently used files into RAM already, so again, system RAM should be maxed before you bother with solid state drives.
Click to expand...
yes, we have had that discussion before and it's clear that the iRAM etc. are not as fast as system RAM and that maxing the latter provides 'more' benefits...
 
I wish iRam2 supported DDR1.

I guess I will get the iRam1 when I upgrade and move on to DDR2 so can make good use of my many gigs of DDR1.

I am using a 320GB SATA drive solely for swap file. The 4GBs in my VMware server aren't enough so VMware swaps a lot to allow more VMs.
The performance as-is is pretty good, but I am guessing it will be even better with the i-Ram.
 
spectrumbx said:
I wish iRam2 supported DDR1.

I guess I will get the iRam1 when I upgrade and move on to DDR2 so can make good use of my many gigs of DDR1.

I am using a 320GB SATA drive solely for swap file. The 4GBs in my VMware server aren't enough so VMware swaps a lot to allow more VMs.
The performance as-is is pretty good, but I am guessing it will be even better with the i-Ram.
Click to expand...

For a VMware server, you should have more than 4GB of system RAM. Of course this means a 64bit cpu and OS to properly take advantage of the RAM.
 
Lazn_Work said:
For a VMware server, you should have more than 4GB of system RAM. Of course this means a 64bit cpu and OS to properly take advantage of the RAM.
Click to expand...
That depends entirely on what you're doing with it ;) I've got a machine with 2 gigs of ram doing heavy lifting on the Linux host OS and acting as essentially a typewriter with XP pro on it using VMware. It's only got half a gig allocated to XP, and it runs fine. If it were doing heavy lifting in XP and typewriter mode under Linux it might need more memory, but as it is I don't even need 2 gigs of memory on the machine.
 
We're growing our ESX 3 host farm @ work exponentially - I just put in a couple HP DL380G5's w/32GB RAM per box, hehe. That's a lot of $$$ RAM. I love VMWare ESX. I can't wait until I can buy 4 way, quad-core XEON, 64MB RAM, ESX host boxes. :eek:

We're talkin' a good yearly salary for the price of that bad boy.

All on TB's of wonderful 15K FC SCSI goodness.

Sorry, slightly off-topic.
 
It gets even bigger when I walk in my DataCenter, hehe. :eek:

But no, I'm not trying to flex my e-member, I'm just havin' a ball playing with this stuff - I just got to put these 2 in, a few days ago! There are moments when I really like my job and this is one of those moments. Staying up, all through the night, all weekend, performing an Exchange migration, like say...this weekend? :eek:

Those are times I don't like my job.

Anyway, off-topic again. :)
 
Brahmzy said:
It gets even bigger when I walk in my DataCenter, hehe. :eek:

But no, I'm not trying to flex my e-member, I'm just havin' a ball playing with this stuff - I just got to put these 2 in, a few days ago! There are moments when I really like my job and this is one of those moments. Staying up, all through the night, all weekend, performing an Exchange migration, like say...this weekend? :eek:

Those are times I don't like my job.

Anyway, off-topic again. :)
Click to expand...

so, have you used an iRam drive for home use? I guess u can borrow some ram to test it out :)
 
So I have 2 i-Rams in Raid 0, 2GB each Paid about $500 for the whole setup including tax and shipping. I get benchmarks saying 120mb/sec of sustained thruput. Though a couple of benchmarks show 260 mb/sec, which is approaching the theoretical limit of Sata I for 2 drives. Most of the real world benchmarks don't justify this kind of cost for like 20% improvement. I'm a programmer and I spend most of my day waiting for stuff to build/compile/deploy/copy. For my heavy disk intensive read/write/copy work I am getting things to run in about a third of the time. For me, it's worth it.

I have to admit, I think the drive is a bit unstable and files get corrupted every coupld of days. So be sure to keep a backup of things, when they are running well. I copy from my backup drive and things are happy again.

Carlos
 
This is what I've heard about the original i-RAMs - occasional corruption, entire data loss and general weirdness. Which is one of the biggest reasons I haven't gone there yet. Hopefully iRAM 2 is leagues ahead of the original in every way.
 
Brahmzy said:
This is what I've heard about the original i-RAMs - occasional corruption, entire data loss and general weirdness. Which is one of the biggest reasons I haven't gone there yet. Hopefully iRAM 2 is leagues ahead of the original in every way.
Click to expand...

Data corruption?
Well, that does it for me. No more iRam. :(

On the plus side, I am seeing this and the price is making me happy. :)

Upgrading my VMware server to 4 of those and kentsfield sometime next year is now in the plan.
 
I don't normally get to post on threads like this so it feels nice to have some input for a change. I have quite a bit of experience playing around with the iRAM card from Gigabyte. I have the SATA150 4 GB max mem version of the board. I can definatively state, for the record, that if you are considering this board (and I'm not saying one way or the other whether that's a good thing or a bad thing), then you should know that the risk / reward on this investment is not favorable. In other words, if you work for a company and you have a discretionary budget and you want to play around with it and see what you can do then I see no problem there (that's how I got the board). However, if this purchase is coming out of your pocket then $500 (and that's what it'll cost you if you want to load it up with 4 GB of memory) is a risky expenditure. Here's why, based on my experience:

1. The card flat out does not work with certain SATA controllers. I first tried to use this beast in an HP DL-380 using an Adaptec PCI-X SATA RAID controller. It could find the ram drive during POST. I could even low-level format the thing in the controller utility. The disk never showed up in Windows. Ever. I tried this thing on a Gateway PC. The system wouldn't boot unless I connected the iRAM to the correct SATA port on the motherboard. It was like playing musical chairs getting it to work. I was finally able to get the iRAM to show up in Windows on the HP server by getting the cheapest SATA add-on card I could find at CompUSA.

2. On this second point, this is all speculation on my part because I'm admittedly no expert on disk controllers or drives, etc, but I think there is something funky with the disk geometry (that the iRAM card uses in conjunction with the SATA controller). After I gave up on using this thing in the HP and in keeping with the "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade" philosophy, I decided that this would make a great addition to my VMware Workstation PC. At first I thought that I'd be nice to store my page file on this thing so that I could max out the memory on VMs and, once workstation started caching out to the host page file, I wouldn't have such a hit on performance. But then I came up with a better use for the thing. What if I created a golden master image and stored it on the iRAM card. Then if I created linked clones to the iRAM image, 80-90% of my disk I/O for all of my linked clones would be coming off of my iRAM card. Brilliant, I thought! Not so fast! The only way I was able to setup the VM was to first create it on a physical disk and then move it over to the iRAM card. Otherwise, it would either bomb out after text-mode setup of Windows or, depending on the size of the disk, text-mode wouldn't even be able to format it (thus, maybe there's something funky with the geometry). I still don't know whether or not this setup is going to work because the first VM I created went bad almost immediately. Since then, I've conducted various tests to make sure that the memory on my iRAM board isn't bad. Now I'm going through a rigorous serious of automated reboots to see if this image will stay stable on the iRAM card before I start linking dozens of clones to it.

3. This system I have has an iRAM with 4 GB of memory and 4 10k RPM SATA Raptor drives (some of the fastest SATA drives on the market). The 4 SATA disks are in RAID0 config. for optimal size usage and performance. The 4 SATA disks cost $640. The iRAM drive cost $550 (card and mem when I bought it). The iRAM is faster for sure but the 4 raptor drives are fast enough. Sure, the Raptors are LOUD and the iRAM is silent. But the Raptors are also 70 times bigger than the iRAM and if the power goes out I don't have to worry about losing my data after 10 hours.

4. If you think that you can put more than one of these in a system and get RAID0 out of it, good luck. It'd be really nice, don't get me wrong. The geek in me dreams of cramming dozens of these cards into a system and hooking them up to a 3ware 12-port SATA raid controller (like the Escalade) to make some kind of freaky frankenNAS but you can forget about that pipedream. Unless you want to shave down the little metal pieces on the back side of the card, there is no way that you can put two of these side-by-side in a system. They will bump into each other. You'd need at least 3 free PCI slots to make a two card config work. And by that time, you'd have been much better off investing your $1000 into 6 raptor drives. Trust me.

On the up side, running a benchmark tool (in this case, a tool from passmark.com), I was able to increase my overall score by about 10% when I had it run tests on the iRAM board vs. the raptors. Nice for showing up my friends (no one has been able to match the 617 I posted). They don't have to know I cheated.... shhhhhh!
 
have you tried using it as an OS drive, or maybe installing games on it?
 
i want to run 2 4GB I-RAM in RAID 0. i bought the 1X pci-e SIBA with silicone image 3132 and the thing works great with 150 mb/s transfer rate (sandra). now this is bottle neck. i bought the 8X areca 1210 pci-e. the two 74 gb raptors that i have are great with it. but when i connect the i-RAM's the card sees them but it can't create raid volume because the S.M.A.R.T. feature is kikin in (explaned by the areca team) and the card refuses to create the array. is there any card on this world (pci-e) that can make this combination possible. the fastest storage devices in RAID 0 with an 8X PCI-E RAID controller. or does anybody know a forum that this matter can be discussed?
thanks
and there is NO corruption what so ever for two months fresh install of winXP
 
You are likely to get excellent results with an iRAM hooked to the on-board SATA controller of any recent motherboard that supports raid (nForce 4/5/6, ich5r/6r/7r/8r).

One day my iRAM just lost its data, when I was installing my video card. I do not know why it happend, maybe I need to check the battery status...
 
ok, i don't care about the money-storage space ratio, i don't care about the backup battery how long will resist, i don't care about motherboard on-board controllers. the only thing that i care is: add-on card, pci-e, 4x or 8x, who makes the controller and where i can get it. even if it is software raid, or with it's own processor.
 
dssconsumer said:
dear sir, do you know who is making add-on raid controller pci-e 4x or 8x. i have the areca 1210 and as you know this add-on card doesn't support the i-ram in any configuration because the s.m.a.r.t. feature. or if you know a forum that this can be discussed. thanks!
Click to expand...
I would recommend an onboard controller. Ignoring SMART status is generally a Bad Thing to do - if a disk is dying, the controller should know and warn you about it right away. So addon cards generally require good SMART status from their drives, and since the iRam doesn't do SMART you can't use them.

The Intel ICH series should support the iRams fine. They're plenty fast, even with real disks, and they're cheap ;)

1x pci-express is 200 MB/s of user data. So even a 2x controller would be plenty for 2 or 3 ramdisks. However, every controller I can think of (Highpoint 2310, Adaptec 2410, and Areca) requires SMART support. I think onboard is your best bet.

This is all Gigabyte's fault - implementing SMART would have fixed all the compatibility problems, and let them report errors as well. I suggest you email them and complain, as well as ask if they have a suggested controller.

 
mjz_5 said:
maybe flash solid state is the better way to go

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4962

check out THG review (i know, and i'm very sorry)

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/
Click to expand...

The main problem with putting a file system on flash is that the file distribution is not inherently random. When you write 1000 files to the disk, it starts as close to the beginning of the disk as free space allows. Let's say you then delete 300-400 of those files. Later, when you write to the disk again, it's going to write to those same blocks again (assuming you're using EXT3 or NTFS). In the long run you end up nuking part of your flash drive relatively quickly, while portions have seen comparatively little access at all. NTFS and EXT3 are geared towards being placed on a circular disk system and it's actually quite a good implementation for such disks.

The JFFS2 filesystem addresses some of the issues of putting a filesystem on flash and spreads the data a little more randomly across the disk, but we're very far from a final solution IMO.
 
sdavids5670 said:
I don't normally get to post on threads like this so it feels nice to have some input for a change. I have quite a bit of experience playing around with the iRAM card from Gigabyte...
Click to expand...

Thanks for your detailed input.

I am no longer interested in the i-Ram for:
1. I am getting 8GB for my new VMware server (up from 4GBs).
2. I think buying a fast drive (raptor) and using it for swap only would bring enough benefits and less headaches.
3. Spending the money on faster drives for your VMs and then making the VMs swap more (reduce memory allocated the VM) instead of the host, could prove more beneficial than the i-Ram.
 
mjz_5 said:
Also, anyone with the iram 1 drive, how do u guys like em? Worth the cash?
Click to expand...
I've been using a 4GB iRam as my C: drive for nearly 7 months now.
Not a single instance of data corruption or loss the entire time.
I've come to value the silence more than the speed (which is considerable) and find normal drives to be pretty obnoxious in comparison.

Using a custom (nLite) XP Pro install and being careful to keep most apps installed on my D: drive (where the page file resides as well), I'm currently only using 1.4GB of the available space.

I was fortunate to have purchased mine before the rise in memory prices (total cost was @$400 w/ gSkill PC3200 RAM) and even then I knew the cost/benefit ratio was absurd, so probably wouldn't do it given today's prices.
Even so, I'm pleased with the performance and stability and happy I've had the chance to play with the sort of technology I think we'll be moving towards in the future.

I still get a chuckle watching Perfect Disk "defrag" the drive...it takes about ten seconds.
I'm not sure that defragging actually does anything, but it's amusing and that has to be worth something.
 
After playing around with the card, I think I've finally settled on the best use of the technology for my situation. Rather than swapping off the iRAM drive, I'm using it to store a golden master image of Windows 2003 Server. Since the image is static (never changes), I just created a backup copy before I started spawning linked clones. Now I just create linked clones off of it. I can boot several Windows 2003 Server virtual machines (using VMware workstation 5.5) simultaneously with barely a peep from my disk drives and they all boot ridiculously fast. Since the gm image never changes and all of the changes to the linked clones are done to files store on the regular disk drives, recovering from a memory corruption error on the iRAM drive should be relatively easy to do. If the data on the iRAM ever does get corrupted, I'll just have to restore from my original backup and everything will be back to normal (hopefully - haven't tested yet but the reasoning is sound).
 
sdavids5670 said:
After playing around with the card, I think I've finally settled on the best use of the technology for my situation. Rather than swapping off the iRAM drive, I'm using it to store a golden master image of Windows 2003 Server. Since the image is static (never changes), I just created a backup copy before I started spawning linked clones. Now I just create linked clones off of it. I can boot several Windows 2003 Server virtual machines (using VMware workstation 5.5) simultaneously with barely a peep from my disk drives and they all boot ridiculously fast. Since the gm image never changes and all of the changes to the linked clones are done to files store on the regular disk drives, recovering from a memory corruption error on the iRAM drive should be relatively easy to do. If the data on the iRAM ever does get corrupted, I'll just have to restore from my original backup and everything will be back to normal (hopefully - haven't tested yet but the reasoning is sound).
Click to expand...

Wouldn't a drive with large enough cache achieve the same level of performance since all that's done on the i-Ram is read-only?

Most people get good performance by putting the base image on one drive and the linked clones on another.

Try doing it the other way around: base on HD and linked clones on i-Ram.
I would be interested to see how that fairs out.
 
i sent an email to kyle, pleading for him to review the iram :p

--------

I'm just curious if you guys are going to review the iRam drive. It seems like a very interesting product but I don't have the ram to test it out for myself. I have a wd raptor hd in my main rig, but i still find games like F.E.A.R to be choppy when entering new areas and I would think the iRam drive would help.

Please do a review, i kill to have an iRam drive, i hate waiting for hard drives.
 
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