The RamDisk

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Hey I was wondering (sorry if this question has been asked a lot before) why the RamDisks (PCI cards that use RAM sticks as non-volatile storage via power current through the PCI slot) don't use the PCI slot for data transfer. It'd be a lot faster than SATA and SATA2! Lots of things already use the PCI slot as data transfer, like Sound Cards and Graphics Cards so why can't these RamDisks use it for data transfer? It'd be revolutionary... so fast... *drools* :eek:
 
I think there are products like that, but they cost $$$$ The newer ramdisks are all about doing it cheaply, and using SATA is the cheapest option with 'ok' performance.
 
Gigabyte's RamDisk uses the PCI slot for power only. It does usa the SATA channel for data. Also, the ram is very volatile. It's just that theres an 18 hour or so backup battery onboard that's constantly kept charged by the PCI slot.
 
Matt Welke said:
Hey I was wondering why the RamDisks don't use the PCI slot for data transfer.
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The idea is to have it function like any other normal disk. Which don't plug in to a PCI slot for data transfer. It uses a disk connection so it can do other disklike things like be connected to a RAID controller or whatever.

Not all ramdrives are powered off a PCI slot BTW.
 
Ya but then why not just have a jumper to control the data flow from the PCI slot to the harddrive controller or whatever you call it so that a PCI slot can act as a drive/disk? And do disk-like things?
 
Matt Welke said:
Ya but then why not just have a jumper to control the data flow from the PCI slot to the harddrive controller or whatever you call it so that a PCI slot can act as a drive/disk? And do disk-like things?
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Because the PCI slot is way slower than SATA? I'm not sure I understand your question.
 
~300mb/s isnt that huge when you consider what else is sharing the bandwidth and take overheads etc into account. If you want a big ram drive, buy another gig of ram and do it in software, 5630 MB/s thats what im talking about.
 
Herulach said:
~300mb/s isnt that huge when you consider what else is sharing the bandwidth and take overheads etc into account. If you want a big ram drive, buy another gig of ram and do it in software, 5630 MB/s thats what im talking about.
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Also a very good point. However what if you've got a content creation workstation that's already got its memory capacity maxed out & in use? Having a ramdrive to do scratch on might be useful.

Random example, not even sure if that's the best use for one of these things. They're good, but there's a lot more places where they're not the best solution than where they're useful.
 
ashmedai said:
Also a very good point. However what if you've got a content creation workstation that's already got its memory capacity maxed out & in use? Having a ramdrive to do scratch on might be useful.

Random example, not even sure if that's the best use for one of these things. They're good, but there's a lot more places where they're not the best solution than where they're useful.
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True, but, i dont think scratch is really where a sata/pci ramdisk would come into its own, since the main advantage is latency, rather than bandwidth, (youre still limited to bus speed, and assuming i understand correctly what scratch is).

Anyway, they had a 60$ one at computex, so we can all find out how good it is when that comes to market, think main use would be installing games etc, but they need to supply something to copy the data over to a real disk at shutdown boot, which would take a bloody age for big disks.
 
Yeah like I said it's just the first made up example that I could pull out of my ass. I suspect it'd be highly useful for video encoding depending on capacity. Which is apparently 8GB if you install 4x2GB.
 
8GB of ram drive would be safe as anything, but it will prob go the way of raid, cool at first, then people realize that its not all that much faster for the arse it would be to do anything, realistically it would help game loads, but then you have to wait for the data to be backed up to a real disk before you can power down, even really intensive things like video encoding probably dont take that much of a hit from disk i/o, especially not when you consider that any decent amount of ram is gonna be nearly equal to the cost of a nice shiny P4 :)

Not that im a sceptic or anything :)
 
Better improve the hell out of something for the cost involved in 2GB modules.
 
ashmedai said:
Better improve the hell out of something for the cost involved in 2GB modules.
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i agree

as a side note, how's 2.5-2-2 at stock speed and voltage sound for a 1gb stick? :p
 
Herulach said:
~300mb/s isnt that huge when you consider what else is sharing the bandwidth and take overheads etc into account. If you want a big ram drive, buy another gig of ram and do it in software, 5630 MB/s thats what im talking about.
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I think we already debunked this. Windows XP doesnt do ramdrives, from what I have seen.
 
Comte said:
I think we already debunked this. Windows XP doesnt do ramdrives, from what I have seen.
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Whether or not XP ships with the ability is irrelevant, as he said "do it in software" and not "do it in Windows XP". There's a wide wide world out there with many different softwares besides just XP.
 
Windows XP would work on the ramdisk if it is seen as a sata device right? All you got to do is install drivers for it when windows setup ask for them. I have considered doing something like this, but just for the operating system. I think that it would be awhole lot faster than any hard drive would be, and it would be interesting to see how much faster it would perform.
 
1) It's perfectly possible to run a ramdrive in software under Windows XP.

2) The Gigabyte iRAM connects via SATA in part because then you can do anything with it that you could do with any other SATA drive. Although I don't think you'll have much luck sticking it in an external case, or modding it in to your XBOX/Playstation.
 
Didn't Gigabyte already say that it comes with the software needed to make it happen? I think it's a dead issue.
 
Even then, the only software it should need at all would be for administrative purposes only. Do you need software when you install a new hard drive? Same thing here.
 
|NOLAFF|-JD said:
Windows XP would work on the ramdisk if it is seen as a sata device right? All you got to do is install drivers for it when windows setup ask for them. I have considered doing something like this, but just for the operating system. I think that it would be awhole lot faster than any hard drive would be, and it would be interesting to see how much faster it would perform.
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WHat would it improve? Your boot times? I doubt it, since youd have to boot something from somewhere then copy your windows install to the ram drive (probably at least a minute or 2) before you could load it. I really wouldnt trust my os to a battery backup.
 
ashmedai said:
Whether or not XP ships with the ability is irrelevant, as he said "do it in software" and not "do it in Windows XP". There's a wide wide world out there with many different softwares besides just XP.
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Yeah I totally forgot about that! I have a program that emulates the RAM as a drive... Thing is, my motherboard only has 3 RAM slots and I can't afford huge 1GB sticks, and you have to re-add the data to the "Virtual HardDrive" (what my program calls it) whenever you boot up because there is no current or battery power flowing through the RAM when its off.

But jeez those things are fast... And you can use any RAM as fast you want. Imagine DDR2 667 MHrz.... :D
 
Everybody is hyping boot times, and I agree they would be impressive. But 2 second boot times arent really important in the real world. The improvement in the swap file access time would be real and important, however. As a 2 or 4 gigabyte HDD, with no moving parts, it should be much faster than a HDD with spinning platters and read arms. As the pictures of HD Tach show, the access time doesnt get worse with larger files, it stays constant. I cant find the pictures now, but instead of a slowly decreasing line going down, it was constantly straight across the graph. Thats impressive.

And, if the battery back up runs out after 12 hours, who cares if you lose your swap file? Windows will just make another one.

Found the pics of HD Tach.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=148&type=expert&pid=9
 
Comte said:
Everybody is hyping boot times, and I agree they would be impressive. But 2 second boot times arent really important in the real world. The improvement in the swap file access time would be real and important, however. As a 2 or 4 gigabyte HDD, with no moving parts, it should be much faster than a HDD with spinning platters and read arms. As the pictures of HD Tach show, the access time doesnt get worse with larger files, it stays constant. I cant find the pictures now, but instead of a slowly decreasing line going down, it was constantly straight across the graph. Thats impressive.

And, if the battery back up runs out after 12 hours, who cares if you lose your swap file? Windows will just make another one.

Found the pics of HD Tach.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=148&type=expert&pid=9
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The swap is really redundant though, if youre buying ram for in one of these, youd be far better putting it in as real ram, and before you say yeah but youre limited, how many times you think youre gonna hit the swap with 8GB of ram?

 
A really neat idea for using RAM as a disk would be CD-ROM emulator files. Ever heard of programs like Virtual Drive? They make the files on a CD a large file on the HDD. Imagine putting one of these files in the RAM and loading it from there. Instant loading all the time. :p
 
Herulach said:
The swap is really redundant though, if youre buying ram for in one of these, youd be far better putting it in as real ram, and before you say yeah but youre limited, how many times you think youre gonna hit the swap with 8GB of ram?
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Windows isn't really the best at memory management and will send stuff to swap even with a bunch of memory free. Having a 512 MB or 1 GB ram drive for the swapfile would give a decent speed boost while not being too expensive imo
 
It's not going to swap until it runs out of memory, if you tell it to do it that way...
 
Herulach said:
The swap is really redundant though, if youre buying ram for in one of these, youd be far better putting it in as real ram, and before you say yeah but youre limited, how many times you think youre gonna hit the swap with 8GB of ram?
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Is there even a motherboard that supports 8GB of RAM?

What about systems that have the maximum ammount of RAM allready installed on the board? This would be another way to upgrade your ammount of RAM if your motherboard/processor didnt support any more.

I found this quote interesting from the article that was linked:
...we found that the memory that was running on the iRAM was in fact only running at 33 MHz!
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Now think for a second, do they even make DDR ram that slow? How cheap would that be? :eek:
 
Unknown-One said:
Is there even a motherboard that supports 8GB of RAM?
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8GB and beyond. Think most desktop boards top out around 4GB though.


Unknown-One said:
Now think for a second, do they even make DDR ram that slow? How cheap would that be?
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DDR speeds are a maximum rating, anything equal to or less than the rated speed should work.

Also I haven't seen anything confirming that what you quoted was at all accurate.
 
ashmedai said:
DDR speeds are a maximum rating, anything equal to or less than the rated speed should work.
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i have some trouble getting my ballistix working under 100mhz :(
 
(cf)Eclipse said:
i have some trouble getting my ballistix working under 100mhz :(
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Micron chips are weird. Good, but weird.

BTW, don't you have a hobby besides tweaking memory? :D

And last I heard this thing ran like PC2100 speeds or something like that. Not 33MHz.
 
ashmedai said:
BTW, don't you have a hobby besides tweaking memory? :D
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does being a lifeguard count for anything? :p


and yeah, it is ddr2100.. 133mhz :D


and sorry about locking my thread. you'll like the changes when it reopens ;)
 
Herulach said:
The swap is really redundant though, if youre buying ram for in one of these, youd be far better putting it in as real ram, and before you say yeah but youre limited, how many times you think youre gonna hit the swap with 8GB of ram?

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I can put 2 gb of ram in my current computer. From this setup, when I upgrade, I will have to do everything, case, powersupply, everything. I might even go AMD next, I have never built one of those.

Even if I put in 2 gb of ram, windows XP will need a swap file, and if I turn it off and runn out of memory, windows xp will dynamically make a swap file anyway. If thats the case, I want that swap file on the fastest HDD possible, and that would be one of these Gigabyte I-Ram drives. No other HDD I have ever seen have kept a consistant 107 mbps read time no matter how large the file. This should buy me 6 more months on the current computer I have. And I found a place with 1gb PC2100 ram for $56.00. Sounds doable to me.
 
what's more important to me is the latency. even if it's around 100ns, it's far faster than the ~8-10ms of a normal hd.
 
(cf)Eclipse said:
what's more important to me is the latency. even if it's around 100ns, it's far faster than the ~8-10ms of a normal hd.
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Bingo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Herulach said:
WHat would it improve? Your boot times? I doubt it, since youd have to boot something from somewhere then copy your windows install to the ram drive (probably at least a minute or 2) before you could load it. I really wouldnt trust my os to a battery backup.
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Are you not aware that these run on power constantly supplied while the PC is off, and contains a battery, and thus can be used just like any other hard drive? You wouldn't have to copy over anything to boot, the battery only kicks in if you unplug the pc's power cord, or actually lose power. At least around here, and 18 hour power outage takes an act of god, and we don't get too many of those. I'd trust my OS to this completely, maybe have it backed up on another HD partition, but either way I'd take the fast boots, no load times for gaming (or any stored app launching for that matter) etc. I've been waiting years for solid state to come around, and unlike raid, this offers very extreme performance increases.
 
mikelz85 said:
Are you not aware that these run on power constantly supplied while the PC is off, and contains a battery, and thus can be used just like any other hard drive? You wouldn't have to copy over anything to boot, the battery only kicks in if you unplug the pc's power cord, or actually lose power. At least around here, and 18 hour power outage takes an act of god, and we don't get too many of those. I'd trust my OS to this completely, maybe have it backed up on another HD partition, but either way I'd take the fast boots, no load times for gaming (or any stored app launching for that matter) etc. I've been waiting years for solid state to come around, and unlike raid, this offers very extreme performance increases.
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I dont know, where i am power outages for that long are'nt too common, but they do happen. Ive had bad experience with battery backups, i go so through so many cr2032s its amazing, it'd be just my luck to that the battery would fail every 2 or 3 days.

If it could somehow pull power from 5 VSB i'd be a little more confident in it (if it can't, i dont think pci can supply standby voltage, though i may be wrong.
 
As far as I'm concerned battery = nice, but not something I'd rely on exclusively.
 
I'm pretty sure that the PCI bus carries some voltage even when the computer is off, so as long as its pluged into the wall (and the power to your house is still on :p ) your good!
The battery would only kick in if it totaly loses power, and seeing how long motherboards hold their BIOS settings if you dont take the their battery out (I've seen them last months :eek: ) I would compleatly trust my data to this!

I'll just back it up once a month like I do all my other drives :D
 
It should be powered off of standby current unless the PSU is switched off, the computer is unplugged, or its connection to the wall is otherwise interrupted.

Of course if your computer is turned off for a substantial period it's always good to unplug or otherwise interrupt its connection to the wall. So any weekend jaunts might lead to this thing losing power assuming you're doing that.
 
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