The RamDisk

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Even with the computer turned off, the iRam is supposed to keep its memory without resorting to its battery. So if you have a UPS backup battery, think how long it will last in a power outage if your computer is plugged into it, turned off. A real damn long time, even on a cheap UPS. Then 18 hours after that runs out, you'll finally lose the contents of the iRam drive. Seems pretty safe to me. If there's a hurricane coming your way, then yeah, backup your iRam to disk, lol.
 
Nah, they're going to use shitty batteries that are rated for 16-18 hours, but only really get about 30 minutes.
 
One could use an UPS with a few weeks worth of power to keep simple ram charged if you were that paranoid. It's not going to use that much power.
Also someone asked if it could transfer through the PCI slot for transfers? Jeebus 133MBS for PCI is < than 150Mbs for SATA. In raid thats 300.
My only hope for the iRam drive is that its flashable to SATA2 when the standard comes around. That and enough money in my bank account to build 16 gigs worth of solid state drive.
Has anyone here seen what it can do for downloads as IE cache? Its amazing!
I have used a software ramdrive with dual channel 400 that equates to 800Mbs fast.
Games load in a blink. Downloads on broadband rock with ram cahce.
Seems like alot of people forget that hard drives are the limiting factor in performance. Yeah a small 4 gig drive sucks, but four of them in RAID will spoil you like going from broadband to dialup. You will quikly get annoyed by other slower drives even scsi drives will crawl in comparison.
 
wow thats an excellent idea i think? using a UPS. but how would you do it so only the RAM is getting the power not the rest - would'nt the UPS be able to run the RAM for like a month or something without any extra power?

griff30 but these RAM drives use the same SATA interface?
 
Set up a lot of AA's in a parallel config so you get 1.2v (rechargeables, duh) but 10000000000000000000mah. :)
 
griff30 said:
Has anyone here seen what it can do for downloads as IE cache? Its amazing!
I have used a software ramdrive with dual channel 400 that equates to 800Mbs fast.
Games load in a blink. Downloads on broadband rock with ram cahce.
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You have broadband that can saturate SATA do you? Where abouyts do you live, and where are you d/ling from? Also, 800Mbs for ddr 400 is very slow, try ~5000

Seems like alot of people forget that hard drives are the limiting factor in performance. Yeah a small 4 gig drive sucks, but four of them in RAID will spoil you like going from broadband to dialup. You will quikly get annoyed by other slower drives even scsi drives will crawl in comparison.
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First off four raid drives offer no performance advantage over 2.

Why would scsi drives be slow? They will still be able to be competitive in sustained transfer applications, just a bit lacking in seek time.

And how exactly do disks limit performance? Only if you dont have enough ram and so are swapping all the time, otherwise they dont, at all, for example, try gaming on an ide drive, then swap in a nice new SATA one, notice any difference in anything other than load times? I dont think you would/could.
 
Herulach said:
You have broadband that can saturate SATA do you? Where abouyts do you live, and where are you d/ling from? Also, 800Mbs for ddr 400 is very slow, try ~5000
... All I have used is DDR400 in dual channel can't say I overclocked or anything. Therefore I can only speak about what I have done. No I cant saturate SATA or even ATA133 for that matter but the ping time was quicker and thats one of ther reasons I purchased the software fromCenatek

First off four raid drives offer no performance advantage over 2.
... Correct! They would only offer more space. My point was that 4 gigs for a main drive sucks but 16 would be better. Unless there was 2 seperate controllers then yes there would be performance increase in MBs not seek time which is null anyway.

Why would scsi drives be slow? They will still be able to be competitive in sustained transfer applications, just a bit lacking in seek time.
... In comparison to Solid state drives I stand by what I said.

And how exactly do disks limit performance? Only if you dont have enough ram and so are swapping all the time, otherwise they dont, at all, for example, try gaming on an ide drive, then swap in a nice new SATA one, notice any difference in anything other than load times? I dont think you would/could.
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...You would. Wait till the benchmarks.
I have a software ramdrive because 4 gigs of real, Solid state drive at one time was $4,000, its down to $3000 now but next month you can buy one loaded with 4 gigs for less than $400, thanks to Gigabyte. I will be one of the first in line. No offence, but its just what I have been waiting for.
.....perplex I intend to use another tower I have with s Pentium 166 for the PCI slots and turn that tower off running on standby power backed up by an UPS. How long would it last? Maybe a couple weeks if the power went out on a 1250 AVR Cyberpower.
 
That's a good idea for figuring out how to run four of those iRam drives, using a seperate computer. But, I bet the computer would have to be turned on to supply operational power to the iRam drives. On just standby power, I'd think it will only be able to keep the memory alive, but not accessible. Still, it will be squeeze for the two iRam drives I plan on running, given all the slots that are already taken and the fact that over half the slots on my MB now are PCIe instead of PCI. So your idea of a second computer just for that is pretty good.

What they really need is a 3.5" hard drive sized iRam drive that uses a molex plug. The only problem is the lack of standby power in that scenario, which I bet is why they haven't done that. Hmmmm. What else besides card slots gets standby power when the computer is switched off, anything?
 
why not just get standby power from a seperate power brick plugged into the wall. Like griff ive been waiting for something like this for a LONG time. boot times arent really a bother for me, as i leave my machine on almost constantly. but app/game loaing and swap file usage would be nice. The benefit this thing would have, wouldnt really be in shear transfer bandwidth, but in access time. i havent seen any specs on the thing as far as access times go, but i would think 100ns wouldnt be too hard, compared with the what 6ms of a 15k scsi drive. your talking about 3-4 orders of magnitude faster access times. this would speed up app load times tremedously.
 
For a couple weeks I've been hoping to find some benchmarks, and here they are! Man, those are some killer scores.

I'd love to sport at least one of those in my next machine. XP & page file on one, favorite games/apps on other. That'd be Q3, C&C: Generals, Wolf: ET, AIM, Winamp, NAV, Shareaza. Oh man, that would RULE.

Incase you can't read the decimals, I wrote this up with the original image as well:
http://jon8rfc.homeip.net/i-ram


Image borrowed from this thread.

EDIT: hopefully I don't get hammered for the image...that site is running on my RR connection, HA!
 
from the pics looks like it will take PC3200 ram without probs
nice....

imagine 4 of these with a PCI-X hardware raid card
around 400 mb/sec isnt bad as long as its 4 independent channels of SATA on the card.
 
Imagine if this board itself was dual or quad channel...
I cant wait till this product hits the streets.
 
griff30 said:
Imagine if this board itself was dual or quad channel...
I cant wait till this product hits the streets.
Click to expand...

I don't think that would matter since you're still limitted by the SATA interface. Now, a direct PCIe 4x or 8x (or even 16x for the DFI Ultra-D and such) would be awesome^10
 
robberbaron said:
I don't think that would matter since you're still limitted by the SATA interface. Now, a direct PCIe 4x or 8x (or even 16x for the DFI Ultra-D and such) would be awesome^10
Click to expand...

not really, since the onboard SATA interfaces could be connected to PCIe or just the SB, having two ports on the iRAM would allow the user to RAID-0 them for improved performance. RAID-0 on these would even make sense, since the seek time is so small, that it isn't a drawback anymore, like it is with regular HDDs.

it could be run in a Via EPIA mobo that takes 8W, even when running, thereby the 1250VA UPS would keep that running for a couple of extra hours.

The iRAM access time is the best, plus the seek time of "really small number" makes it ideal for stuff where random accesses are needed (hello database app)
 
Is that little square chip above the ram slots, a DDR2 buffer? I wonder how much of a difference that would make. Any ideas?
 
Jon8RFC said:
Is that little square chip above the ram slots, a DDR2 buffer? I wonder how much of a difference that would make. Any ideas?
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no difference whatsoever, the iRAM is most likely limited by the SATA interface. The Chips should easily be able to push 2.1GB/s the interface is 150MB/s there is no reason to waste money on a DDR2 buffer.
 
robberbaron
I hope this will have flashable bios that will allow us to flash them to SATA 2. Im going to start with 2 and work up to 4 of these drives if money permits.

I also like that idea of using a via EPIA board. Very low wattage compared even to the p200 was going to use. Its going to make one hell of an external drive.
 
Jon8RFC said:
Is that little square chip above the ram slots, a DDR2 buffer? I wonder how much of a difference that would make. Any ideas?
Click to expand...

It's the FPGA that implements the DDR and SATA interfaces.
 
why not use an external PCI backplane? You can get tons of slots you could mount external to your computer like that....
 
Alot of people I think are missing the Point and not understanding how a computer works in general.

Power is always going to the PCI slots. As long as the Computer is plugged in, even if its off.

The limiting factor in computers is always the Hard disk system. They are by far the slowest comonents.

The ram disk will not bennifit from faster ram whatso ever. If you knew how ram works, it is super super fast comparred to a hard drive. as is hundreds and thousands of MB/s.... this is using a SATA interface (150MB/s Max) so why have faster ram if its going to get bottlenecked by the SATA bus?

I think they need to make this PCIe 1x Bandwidth. Where the power and data transfer is done through the slot. It might be alot faster.


Either way, when it comes out, I am getting 2. I am going to fill them up with 4GB of ram each and raid 0 them. I dont worry about losing stuff, I just ghost the immage to a HDD incase anything happens
 
perplex said:
wow thats an excellent idea i think? using a UPS. but how would you do it so only the RAM is getting the power not the rest - would'nt the UPS be able to run the RAM for like a month or something without any extra power?

griff30 but these RAM drives use the same SATA interface?
Click to expand...
If I get one of these, I'm going to set my UPS to shut my PC down as the power goes out. That way, when the power goes out, the PC will be drawing minimal power, but the iRam will still get fed through the PCI slot. I'm sure the data would last for quite a while that way.
 
This will be my next mod for sure. We run a 32Gig Solid State here at work and the thing is amazing. We keep a copy of our Mainframe Database on it and have all SQL queries pull from it instead of taxing the Alpha. It's a beast (my Boss calls it "The Hemi")and I want a "Mini-Hemi" in my rig.
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
I think they need to make this PCIe 1x Bandwidth. Where the power and data transfer is done through the slot. It might be alot faster.
Click to expand...

The reason for this NOT being a PCI card or a PCIe card is that it is supposed to be transparent to the OS. Since it has a SATA connector, the OS will use this drive as if it was just another HDD, if it were a PCI/e card it would need drivers to accomplish that. Since it does not need drivers, there are fewer variables -> simple system -> more stable. In addition, not needing a driver allows this to be a boot drive for ANY OS that supports the SATA controller.
 
typhoon43 said:
This will be my next mod for sure. We run a 32Gig Solid State here at work and the thing is amazing. We keep a copy of our Mainframe Database on it and have all SQL queries pull from it instead of taxing the Alpha. It's a beast (my Boss calls it "The Hemi")and I want a "Mini-Hemi" in my rig.
Click to expand...

what interface does it use?
 
as was stated several times in this thread its a SATA interface. Also you'll be able to RAID this card. And gigabyte has upgraded it to be able to handle up to 8GB instead of the original. It would be great to get 1 and max it out and then you can always get another and either double the ram or split it inbetween the two for 200+ mb/s transfer rates.
 
perplex said:
what interface does it use?
Click to expand...
lukek said:
as was stated several times in this thread its a SATA interface.
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I think he was asking about the 32GB SSD referenced in the post above, which I think most are either SCSI or IDE.
lukek said:
And gigabyte has upgraded it to be able to handle up to 8GB instead of the original.
Click to expand...
Really? I didn't hear this. Have a link?
lukek said:
It would be great to get 1 and max it out and then you can always get another and either double the ram or split it inbetween the two for 200+ mb/s transfer rates.
Click to expand...
If you set up a RAID-0 array, it actually does both. You get the benefit of the added space, as well as (in theory) doubling the speed.
 
Cheapest 2 Gb stick of DDR on pricwatch is $145. Cheapest PC3200 DDR is $155. $600 for 4 sticks of memory is too much money. You could fit your OS on there, maybe also one game. Just not enough space for too much money for me.

One thing is for sure... memory manufacturers have got to love this idea. I'm surprised one of them didn't come out with it first.
 
What still pisses me off about this is that no one ELSE has managed to build a device that can make use of older, cheaper RAM (like PC100 or 133 for instance) doing the same thing... And why does there only have to be >>4<< slots?? Why not 8? or 16?? I bet it's a lot easier looking for 8 512 MB sticks for a 4 GB partition than, say 4 1GB sticks!! I totally understand not putting a lot of slots on a mobo. It's just cheaper that way to manufacture. But why not get someone to build a couple of big boards (or boxes) that can hold a boatload of cheap RAM sticks?! Is there some technical block wall here that I'm missing??
 
jmroberts70 said:
What still pisses me off about this is that no one ELSE has managed to build a device that can make use of older, cheaper RAM (like PC100 or 133 for instance) doing the same thing... And why does there only have to be >>4<< slots?? Why not 8? or 16?? I bet it's a lot easier looking for 8 512 MB sticks for a 4 GB partition than, say 4 1GB sticks!! I totally understand not putting a lot of slots on a mobo. It's just cheaper that way to manufacture. But why not get someone to build a couple of big boards (or boxes) that can hold a boatload of cheap RAM sticks?! Is there some technical block wall here that I'm missing??
Click to expand...


Well, PC133 and PC100 is more expensive than DDR, believe it or not. A gig stick of either PC100 or PC133 is over $100, while DDR is as low as $66.

I see what you're saying about more slots, though. It would be cool if the board had tolerance for very loose timings and slow speeds. Than RAM makers could make special sticks with reject RAM chips on them that were only suitable for a RAM disk. Who cares if the effective speed is only 100 MHz and the latencies are really high? It won't matter on when you're limited to 150 mb/s.
 
Jonsey said:
A gig stick of either PC100 or PC133 is over $100, while DDR is as low as $66.
Click to expand...

Where have you seen DDR for $66?
The cheapest on newegg is $80(Link)

BTW, I like the idea of remarking the failed ram for use ONLYwith ramdrives, gives some use to sticks that would otherwise end up in the trash, and gives us lower prices :D
 
jmroberts70 said:
What still pisses me off about this is that no one ELSE has managed to build a device that can make use of older, cheaper RAM (like PC100 or 133 for instance) doing the same thing... And why does there only have to be >>4<< slots?? Why not 8? or 16?? I bet it's a lot easier looking for 8 512 MB sticks for a 4 GB partition than, say 4 1GB sticks!! I totally understand not putting a lot of slots on a mobo. It's just cheaper that way to manufacture. But why not get someone to build a couple of big boards (or boxes) that can hold a boatload of cheap RAM sticks?! Is there some technical block wall here that I'm missing??
Click to expand...
Uhh, since when?
CENATEK has been making them for years. They are yours for the taking at $4,000 for a fully loaded 4 gig drive. It runs only through the PCI bus so your limited to 133MBs. I do own their software which rocks. But thjey have made them and used PC100 and PC133 for a long time.
Hell I remember when way back you could buy one that used EDO66 ram that would set you back about ten grand for a gig. The point with Gigabytes iRam drive is that more people can afford this drive at less than $100 a gig including the drive which is $50.I believe Cenatek used to charge $3000 for the bare drive no memory included.
Everyone forgets that hard drives are always the slowest bottleneck in a computer.
If anyone has a link to Gigabyte saying 2 gig modules work please post!
 
For whoever asked, the 32Gig SSD is connected via Fiber Channel NICS. I want to steal it sooo bad :D
 
Priceline is way off on the price of 2GB sticks the prices u see are mostly for 2x1GB kits....
 
typhoon43 said:
For whoever asked, the 32Gig SSD is connected via Fiber Channel NICS. I want to steal it sooo bad :D
Click to expand...

how much does that ssd cost? $10k+ ? what transfer rates do you get?
 
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