Ram disk

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Elf_Boy

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I saw a PCI card a few years back... in print anyways, that had a bunch of DIMM slots on it. Was a ram disk. You could run a seperate power cord from the back to wall. It would back up to hard disk each shutdown (or as scheduled).

Have any products like that made it to market? It would be awsume to put windows on one for boot.

I've seen ads for solid state drives, they are still a tad expensive... Not that this is cheap either.

Thanks
 
That card you saw was the Gigabyte I-RAM was released in 2005 and used DDR RAM only. Gigabyte also released the i-RAM box which was a 5.25" bay version. Both products made it market. But they were expensive, even before the DDR RAM was factored in.
 
Gigabyte iRAM and while it's a nice concept, it's not a "true" RAMdisk in terms of performance overall. Sure, it has incredibly fast random access time, but it's hamstrung by being put on the IDE/SATA bus so... you'll never get more than 300MB/s out of one. They're still available in a lot of places online but... with SSD storage now coming into its own and being just a bit slower than actual RAMdisks in terms of random access speed, I'd say just get an SSD.

For the amount of money you'd spend to get the iRAM and populate it with 8-16GB of RAM, you could get a nice 64GB SSD, maybe even a 128GB considering...
 
I saw something similar except it was designed for 5 1/4 bays, Had like 12 ddr 2 slots. Cost like over a grand though, stupid, stupid high. The OS treated it like a HDD.
 
The iRAM was "seen" as a hard drive, it's the only way it could function even though it was a PCI card - you still had to attach the card to the onboard IDE or SATA controllers even though... well... it's a damned PCI card. ;)

Never did like the concept, and it never did take off, but again with SSDs now here and moving in fast, it's a dead concept anymore.
 
bigdogchris said:
I saw something similar except it was designed for 5 1/4 bays, Had like 12 ddr 2 slots. Cost like over a grand though, stupid, stupid high. The OS treated it like a HDD.
Click to expand...

I think you are referring to the HyperDrive http://www.hyperdrive4.com/index.php.

Its constant transfer is actually crap though by ramdrive standards.

And iRam:
There was a demand for it but Gigabyte clearly wasn't interested, not to mention they made some bad design choices. The use of DDR, still only 4 slot for the 5.25' version etc. I don't think its a matter of R&D cost either as they were using FPGA's for the controller.

The way things are headed I don't think there will be much in the way of consumer ramdrives as ppl are jumping straight to flash SSD instead. Less power, higher capacity, more reliable as you don't have to worry about power cuts and dead battery not to mention cheaper.
 
I've read that SSD - flash based ones - have a limited number or writes and are slower then a good HD. As opposed to Dram which is just plain fast.

I really like the I-Ram idea. A pci card or box that fits into a 5.25 bay, the implimintaions sucks big though. Very limited sata performance and just four dimm sockets each only able to hold 1 gig.

If one was made that did full sata speed, had 8 slots, and supported 1-4 gig dimms... well that could be good.

The i-ram can be had for $150.... Unpopulated, at 4 gigs each I'd need at least 3 of them to make a boot disk I could work with.

How does the read/write speed of a SSD compare to a HD? WOuld two 16/32 gig SSD in raid zero make for super fast boot?

For that matter, does booting need sustained read/write speed or is it all seek speed?

Thanks :)
 
The points of contention are:

- iRAM is expensive without even having RAM on it
- DDR/DDR2 support on the iRAM was for older stuff, and much slower than the current crop of 800 MHz or higher speeds
- iRAM is limited to the IDE or ATA speeds just as an SSD would, so calling it a RAMdisk is pushing it in many respects
- iRAM offers primarily fast random access speed and relatively sustained bandwidth for reads and writes

- SSD drives are coming down in price fast - a 64GB SSD is fairly practical nowadays
- SSD drives have random access times in the .1 to .2 millisecond range, so considerably slower than physical chip RAM (.0001 ms or something similar) but still upwards of 50x faster than even the fastest physical hard drive out now, the Velociraptor (non-SCSI, of course)
- SSD drives offer fast sustained read speeds, approaching the maximum of the IDE or SATA controller for most purposes, but slower on the write cycles which is a factor of Flash-RAM technology by nature

At this point, getting an iRAM would be considered by many to be an exercise in futility and a waste of money. At this point, SSD technology, even at this stage in its development, is superior in many respects to the iRAM. No PCI card to lug around, can be used in a desktop or laptop, etc. So many benefits to SSD hardware over the iRAM or anything like it.

Flash-RAM does have a limited write cycle lifespan, but it's typically in the millions. Also, SSD technology uses wear-leveling so it doesn't constantly rewrite to the same cells where the data is stored or the locations, however you understand it. If you have a file in the first sector and you delete it, the wear-leveling circuitry will not automagically put the next write into that now "empty" space - it'll put it someplace that hasn't been written to yet or someplace with a lower number of write cycles at that point.

Technically, because of wear-leveling, if you had a 64GB SSD, theory holds that the wear-leveling technology would need to write to every single byte of available space on that device before it went to the second write cycle, then it would start over again with sector 1, 2, and so on.

For all practical purposes in today's world, if you bought an SSD drive and brought it home and installed it and started using it, you wouldn't have issues with any of the data cells or locations going "bad" for years to come, even in light of modern OSes that do quite a lot and have a lot of files on the SSD.

Hell, an SSD might even outlast a physical hard drive in many respects. ;)

No worries... if you get one, you'll be happy with the performance as they're getting faster all the time. Most SSDs out now can easily do 90MB/s sustained reads and about 70MB/s sustained writes, and they just keep getting faster as the technology matures.

It's expensive, but one guy bought 4 16GB Mtron SSDs - there's a thread here about it someplace - and put them together in a RAID 0 setup. Sustained reads over 430MB/s, writes a bit slower... all with that awesome .1 ms access time. Amazing stuff. :)
 
For all practical purposes in today's world, if you bought an SSD drive and brought it home and installed it and started using it, you wouldn't have issues with any of the data cells or locations going "bad" for years to come, even in light of modern OSes that do quite a lot and have a lot of files on the SSD
Click to expand...

Is that a given? I mean i hear manufacturers state that all the time and everybody else seems to carry that statement, but on the flip side for what im guessing is a relatively low amount of SSD's shipped (compared to HD's) there seems to be a lot of noise around returns and corrupted data for such drives.
 
News to me, never heard of problems with the good drives from name brand manufacturers. But considering how Flash-RAM works, and the wear-leveling that's built into every SSD, I seriously doubt someone is going to ruin one anytime soon unless they write a piece of software that purposely just keeps writing data across every cell or location from start to finish - and even that would take millions of cycles to do damage.

Modern hard drives typically store data and then read it off - especially with the OS files. They're written and they really don't change at all so they don't need to be read and then rewritten for the most part. The content on a drive doesn't change that much really, even for some hardcore people.

I just can't imagine anyone actually doing anything on an SSD that would cause it to flake out in such ways. If anything I would tend to say the age of the technology is still quite new. Physical hard drive technology has been around for 50 years now, it's as mature as it can possibly get with a drive like the Velociraptor. They simply cannot make them much faster than that drive right now.

Sure a 15K Velociraptor would kick some serious ass even more, but... physical hard drive tech has reached its peak and SSDs will be the standard within another 1-2 years from today, especially with how quickly the prices are coming down and the tech is maturing.

Get one and get speed... it's about that simple.
 
I hunt this forum hoping for 'son of' i-Ram to show up. Were there a DDR2 version, I would snag it up in a second. The original iRam was 4x1G. 4x2G, or better 8x2G would be a godsend. Not worried about backups - easy enough to create an image. The speed of RAM vs reading/writing from flash memory is significant.
 
heelix said:
I hunt this forum hoping for 'son of' i-Ram to show up. Were there a DDR2 version, I would snag it up in a second. The original iRam was 4x1G. 4x2G, or better 8x2G would be a godsend. Not worried about backups - easy enough to create an image. The speed of RAM vs reading/writing from flash memory is significant.
Click to expand...

8*2 I could make it my boot disk. Keep it backed up of course. Installs would be pretty fast though.

With 2 or 3 of them in raid zero all in all it would speed up the system incredably.
 
heelix said:
I hunt this forum hoping for 'son of' i-Ram to show up. Were there a DDR2 version, I would snag it up in a second. The original iRam was 4x1G. 4x2G, or better 8x2G would be a godsend. Not worried about backups - easy enough to create an image. The speed of RAM vs reading/writing from flash memory is significant.
Click to expand...

ACARD ANS-9010/B

ANS-9010
8x DDR2
CF backup
64gb max
Up to 400MB/sec
2 sata ports (I'm guessing you have to raid-0)

ANS-9010B
6x DDR2
CF backup
48gb max
Up to 200MB/sec

Specs are nice but will probably cost too much to make it worth it for most people.
 
Neat but... yeah, that price to populate it would be insane. Wonder how much 8GB sticks of DDR2 800 would be, anyway... I wonder...

Let's see... $1643.59 for one 8GB DDR2 stick x 8 for 64GB max =

$13,148.72 - and that's without shipping or the cost of the device itself. Can you say "HOLY FREAKIN' BATSHIT, BATMAN!!!"
 
My Budget would be more like 8 * 2 for 16 gigs.

Wonder how much for the bare drive?
 
I emailed to ask about the price and availability in the US.No answer. If it wasnt to God awful expensive I would buy and use it.

I have a friend that does a lot of rendering with poser. I bet it would help him a lot too for use as the virtual memory drive.
 
Joe Average said:
News to me, never heard of problems with the good drives from name brand manufacturers. But considering how Flash-RAM works, and the wear-leveling that's built into every SSD, I seriously doubt someone is going to ruin one anytime soon unless they write a piece of software that purposely just keeps writing data across every cell or location from start to finish - and even that would take millions of cycles to do damage.
Click to expand...
The OCZ forums are a buzz with failed SSD's. As many fail as succeed. It appears to be some type of issue with drivers, or bios, or star alignment (meaning OCZ has no freaking clue). This is the main reason I have held off on the "cheap" SSD drives.

 
In my business we've been using SSD's for several years and have had the same experience.....something like 50% failure rate. :(
 
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