SSD for the Masses

As soon as these are available, I'm so on it. I have 2 sticks of 512 registered ECC I can't use, so as long as this takes registered memory I am so set.
 
Is there anything else like this on the market now? I'm looking for one currently, the gigabyte would be ok, but I have had little luck finding anything like this for sale. I only need 2-4 GB of space and I know there are others out there. Thanks for any help.
 
Ice Czar said:
:eek: $50? :eek:

its too much to hope theyd make a PCI-X version Id guess
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From the description, the thing plugs into a SATA port for the data transfer and only leeches its power from the PCI slot.
 
It would be much cooler if it acted like a scsi controller on its own and used the PCI bus for its bandwidth.... esp if PCIe.
 
Naaw, SATA hook up is better - a direct, point to point 150MB/sec (or possibly 300MB/sec if it's SATA-II ready). 32 bit PCI maxes out at 133MB/sec, and all the devices on the bus comptete for the bandwidth. The only reason to use a PCI slot is to power the unit. Nowadays, SATA ports are integrated directly into the southbridge, so you'll have no I/O bottlenecks using SATA. I wouldn't want to loopback this thing into a PCI add in card though ;) A PCI-E interconnect would be nice, but SATA-II is faster than PCI-E x1, using a bus interconnect rather than a storage interconnect dramatically increases integration problems, and not too many people have PCI-E x1 slots, although that is changing. The Enterprise isn't going to buy into this with onyl 16 hours of battery life except as crazy fast swap space anyway.

This is undeniably slick as the GigaByte method means NO drivers other than the SATA driver you would install anyway. No BIOS hacks, no OS support worries, nothing. This method makes it truly transparent to the OS - it really is just another hard drive. It will also be bootable - but 16 hours of power off endurance is pretty chancy...I wonder if GigaByte can pull off powering it off the +5V SB PSU line?
 
that would really boost a pc's performance if a swap partition was setup on it.
 
It did look cool at the AT article, but 1GB of ECC PC2100 is $125 at the egg. It'd be the most expensive 4GB disk I ever owned. Though it would make one hell of a swap drive.
 
Oh yea, another question I had - how many charge/discharge cycles can the battery handle. Much like my old 1st gen. iPod, after a while the battery will need to be changed. But unlike my iPod, you better backup any permenant data you have on the drive.

And also on the swap angle - it could be a plus for security, since after your computer shuts down the data goes bye bye (if you remove the battery).
 
some of is clear the pagefile at shutdown anyway :p

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
If the value does not exist, add the following value:
Value Name: ClearPageFileAtShutdown
Value Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1

the size of your pagefile greatly depends on how much memory you have and how you employ it, 2GB would "typically" be on the hugh side, quite high actually

loading an ap into am SSD can have a benefit as well, if its accessed alot (say CAD)
 
Is this the only info anyones seen on this? I'd love to know when we can expect to see it, because i'll buy it the second its available.
 
Damn great price.
I will probably buy one

ram cards have been around for awhile
but always been expensive

as for ppl scared about off power. it uses a standard connection. You can easily measure the voltage to the battery, current, and replace with something better. and almost sure a mod would be released that pulls power off the mobo since they're always drawing some power even when off.
 
The day this is available I'll buy one. Wonder how picky it will be with ram, as in mixing speeds or brands. I have 2 gig of ram just sitting in my office waiting for something like this-but range from PC2100 to PC3200.

Check it out when you review [H] !! :D
 
using the 5v standby voltage should be possible since ram draws very little current, and does so at around 2.6 volts.

Plus, it should also be possible to dump the data to a hard drive anyway... :p
 
That's tasty. I can only imagine the possibilities. A mobo with 4 sata ports, 4 cards with 4GB each, run it all as a raid 0 cos who cares about redundancy if it's all volatile, and back it up to a 36GB raptor split in two, for two running backups of your OS. You lose your partition? Ghost it over from the raptor. You're set.
 
You'll chew up 125,000 write cycles real quick like if you use one of these flash drives for OS tasks. A read only boot image would be a little more practical, but it's not going to get the job done.

This is going to crack the mobile segment first. The chance of having a low power flash drive get you to desktop, then have your hard drive spin up, is too tantalizing for a notebook integrator to ignore. This makes even more sense with the generally static nature of laptop hardware configurations. On the desktop, mechanical hard drive are still faster, last longer with frequent writes, and the noise and power advantages aren't a big deal to a desktop user (Well, they do care about thsoe factors, but won't pay extra to reduce them ;))
 
Wow. Insta-boot, right? maybe? And no moving parts! It could be excellent for a silent pc.

Still... like the article said: better not lose power! beware of outages.
 
DougLite said:
You'll chew up 125,000 write cycles real quick like if you use one of these flash drives for OS tasks.
Click to expand...

Good thing it isn't a flash drive. it's a ram drive.
 
considering the price of RAM, and that its a $50 add in card and that I photoshop big tiff or multilevel PSDs

you bet
make a great scratchdisk

now those NAND Flash drives above, arent inexpensive at all, and no I wouldnt pony up the $$$ for one of those
 
This really needs to be paired with a flash or microdrive based disk so that when the battery level starts getting low it would write all the data out to the non-volitale storage. When power is returned it would copy the data back to the ram. I think that type of system would be ideal for more data protection.
 
draksia said:
This really needs to be paired with a flash or microdrive based disk so that when the battery level starts getting low it would write all the data out to the non-volitale storage. When power is returned it would copy the data back to the ram. I think that type of system would be ideal for more data protection.
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That and an extra PCIE x16 slot on the motherboard for a higher bandwidth 4GB/s. 150MB/s is too slow ;)
 
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/4063/050602boot/


"Unlike DRAM-based main memory, the iRam card doesn't lose data when the PC is switched off, said Thomas Chang, a product manager at Giga-byte. 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, he said."

Hell yeah!
 
i was actually thinking about getting one.. but now i think, fuck that... my 74 gig raptor is fast enough
 
how long would it last if one were to use it as a swap drive/partition?
 
What do you mean "last?" DRAM has effectively an unlimited amount of reads and writes during its operating life.
 
This is not flash memory like our little pen drives.

This is regular ram like you plug into your motherboards...

I'd like to see a little more than 4 gigs on one though. I know that you can most likely set up a raid partition, but there are dimms larger than a gig.
 
xonik said:
What do you mean "last?" DRAM has effectively an unlimited amount of reads and writes during its operating life.
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^ ;)

and there is also the great discrepancy in the I\O and R\W of various flash technologies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

for instance
NOR
10,000 to 1,000,000 erase cycles.

Samsungs NAND (new reasonably affordable)
http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/PressRelease.asp?seq=20050523_0000123980
reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps.
Endurance : 100K Program/Erase Cycles
Data Retention : 10 Years

BitMicro E-Disk (obscenely expensive)
http://www.bitmicro.com/products_industrial_military_highend_ssd.php
34 to 44 MB/sec Sustained R/W Rate
40 to 320 MB/sec Burst R/W Rate
random I/O rates of up to 11,700 IOPS, burst read/write rate of up to 320 MB/sec
Data Retention : 10 Years
for the 4.6GB E-Disk 100GB a day erase/write cycles for 123 years
they also come in capacities up to 155GB
 
Couple of these in raid 0 would make for perfect space for OS, swap, game or two, and video or pic files currently being worked on......I'm gonna need more sata ports.

As has been mentioned before, some data management software to dump all data off dimms and onto non-volitile storage would be crucial. Otherwise, since the card continually draws power off the pci slot, just buy a UPS, have it shut down the system as soon as power is lost, and hope to God that power outage doesn't last longer than an hour or two!! (How long does a <$100 UPS supply power to a turned-off PC.....I don't think I've ever seen that kind of figure, only runtime).....

 
jebo_4jc said:
Couple of these in raid 0 would make for perfect space for OS, swap, game or two, and video or pic files currently being worked on......I'm gonna need more sata ports.

As has been mentioned before, some data management software to dump all data off dimms and onto non-volitile storage would be crucial. Otherwise, since the card continually draws power off the pci slot, just buy a UPS, have it shut down the system as soon as power is lost, and hope to God that power outage doesn't last longer than an hour or two!! (How long does a <$100 UPS supply power to a turned-off PC.....I don't think I've ever seen that kind of figure, only runtime).....
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i have a 660 watt UPS.. it lasts 30 minutes when the pc is on.. so i would say at least a day..
 
mjz_5 said:
i have a 660 watt UPS.. it lasts 30 minutes when the pc is on.. so i would say at least a day..
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There you go.
Gigabyte should consider going into the UPS business and selling each one of these drives with a warning label explaining the benefits of a UPS with auto-shutdown capability.
 
I just wonder, will you have to format it everytime it loses power? Like if you used it as for the scratch drive/page file drive and the computer was off, or the power was out for a while, would you have to reformat it before you could use it again? or would it somehow retain the partition info and only loose the information? And can anyone tell if it relies on the battery when the PC is off,... or when the power is completely out?
 
TheTMan said:
I just wonder, will you have to format it everytime it loses power? Like if you used it as for the scratch drive/page file drive and the computer was off, or the power was out for a while, would you have to reformat it before you could use it again? or would it somehow retain the partition info and only loose the information? And can anyone tell if it relies on the battery when the PC is off,... or when the power is completely out?
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It draws power from the PCI slot, and (apparently) motherboards still power PCI slots even when the pc is off. So the battery is only when there is no power available whatsoever.
I don't know about formatting though.
 
Ice Czar said:
+5VSB (Volt StandBy)
for Wake On LAN\WAN and Softpower on (Keyboard wake)
ever since the changeup from AT to ATX PSUs ;)

for ESD and power event precautions w\ a +5VSB ATX see > http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=761614
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Makes a lot of sense that a pci slot gets power for wake on lan, but wouldn't that only apply in sleep mode or something?

 
No, you can WOL from a PC that was shut down by any and all means. As long as its still plugged into the wall, it can wake up....

Did it say it can take ECC DIMMs? I know one would want ECC DIMMs but I never saw anything that explicitly said it takes ECC.
 
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