Gigabyte's RAM drive card w/battery backup...

Zar0n · Post by **Zar0n** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 2:10 am

Some king of mirror software to use with this drive would be great.

Say u wanna speed up a particular game/app, move to ram drive and from then it would run faster.

This would be also a solution if ppl drain card battery, the card is just a mirror for selected data.

I don’t know if there is any windows software that does this, it could be also a problem if you where trying to mirror the OS.

Edward Ng · Post by **Edward Ng** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 2:11 am

Ducky wrote:
BobDog wrote:
wundi wrote:I'm afraid latencies and seek times have nothing to do with bandwidth, and consequently, transfer rates. It's the same thing with kids and food: even with a small mouth they can taste the food right away, but eating a large meal can take a long time For me, though, the bandwidth between the plate and the stomach has grown near infinite, if you know what I mean..
Right, that makes sense to me. However bandwidth is a function of the interface, right? If so, than ought the Simple Tech not be as fast/faster than any magnetic IDE HDD (as a function of its low seek/latency times), even if it would clearly be slower than a SATA drive, as per wundi's observation?

That makes sense to me, but I am very new to this PC stuff so if there is a flaw in my logic I's appreciate a heads up. Thanks--this is helpful.
It's like this:

Flash drives, with their ridiculously low seek times, are capable of blowing away traditional mechanical drives in the following things:

Booting up.

Loading programs

Searching for files
It'd probably be slower to do the following with a Compactflash drive, however:

Reimaging the entire drive

Writing a big, contigeous file, like a movie, when the drives are properly defragmented.
Because of the available standards when Compactflash standards were made, all drives are PIO only. Which means that the computer can't tell the drive "go read some data and tell me when you're done" -- instead, the CPU has to manage all the reading and writing itself. So, when the computer is heavily loaded, the transfer would become much slower. But, it's true that Flash drives can approach the theoretical maximum transfer rates a lot more readily than hard drives unless the CPU is heavily loaded.

You guys, this is not a flash memory product; this is based on RAM, which is completely different in performance profile. Flash is designed to retain its data for long period of time without battery backup; RAM requires power to retain its charge and consequently the stored data. RAM is much faster than flash memory, and as such, flash memory products will not provide an accurate guage of performance here. Flash memory also has a limited number of writes, whereas RAM can be written to as many times as you like without harm. Both, access time and maximum transfer rate are exemplary; flash storage has quite low maximum transfer rate in comparison (heck, there is no comparison!).

-Ed

Edward Ng · Post by **Edward Ng** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 2:12 am

elec999 wrote:From tomshardware news
"The RAM disk will be shipping in the third quarter of this year and will carry a price tag of about $80."
I taught they said it will cost $50, why is it changing.
Thanks

I don't know; last I heard it was $50; if it goes up, that's not too nice, but this is still cheaper than previous similar products, as far as I can tell...

-Ed

perplex · Post by **perplex** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 2:24 am

nice. you could buy about 5 of these and RAID them up. i only just realised how incredible this could be. i forgot that RAM is SO much faster than anything.

what kind of transfer rates do you people estimate? surely much more than 3x hard disk in practise; the full SATA II bandwidth :O?

atomidude · Post by **atomidude** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 3:19 am

ppl here get excited about the speed of these solid state disks... why RAID? what for? have you got any idea how much CPU clocks these things need? how busy the processor is crunching all that data? i guess not

sure, they're good and fast, but i'm afraid useles for say video encoding: too small and way too fast for any cpu on the market now. they're great for servers, in heavy loads network environment. not so for us desktop users. oh, you need silence? get a 2.5" HDD for like 1/10 of the price and 10X more capacity.

and talking on topic: the SATA bus is way too slow for this thing. SATA II would be better, but still not fast enough. want speed? my advice: get a mobo that works with 2GB modules, fill al the banks and use a ramdrive. nothing is faster than that imho

sgtpokey · Post by **sgtpokey** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 3:43 am

There's no need to speculate on performance, we should expect the same experience that MikeC already had with the cenatek (see link already posted). He also talks about what a solution like this might be good for.

This Gigabyte should be the same as that, what makes the gigabyte cool is how cheap it'll be: $50 or $80 is an order of magnitude cheaper than previous models...

This does fulfill a good niche, as long as you know what to expect from it.

It is not a normal drive replacement but it IS now the speed champion AND silence champion within the FOUR gigabyte space. If you can't think of anything constructive to do with superfast 4 gb's, then figure out what your priorities are and either go the 2.5" route as suggested by folks, or get hard drive silencing enclosures for your 3.5" drives

sgtpokey · Post by **sgtpokey** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 3:57 am

Hmm, I just realized Gigabyte hasn't said whether if this can take ECC memory or not.

For this type of application, I'm assuming they can take ECC memory; it would be a little disturbing if it didn't, since these things have no choice but be up 24hrs a day AND need to be 100% accurate.

wim · Post by **wim** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 4:04 am

hey with a ram drive, what happens if the ram lose power by some psu/battery cock-up? it mean you have to setup OS again from some image, right? it would make me feel really weird thinking of my work there kindof electrically treading water. i suppose people would only use this to actually run the OS, and keep any/all 'keeping' information on network.

Edward Ng wrote:You guys, blablabla

ahem, those guys talking about BobDog's thing. but it's good of you to insult everyone's intelligence with the little ram/flash tutorial.
(or did you just mean to be pointing out how OT BobDog dragging the thread?)

atomidude · Post by **atomidude** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 4:19 am

you could rebuild the ramdrive at boot from a hdd or over the network. sure, it might take 2', but is that an issue? at shotdown, all you have to do is to write the new image on the same hdd. to keep it safe, use a UPS.
afterall, the gigabyte solution is nothing else but a sloooow ramdrive with a battery that last 16 hours

that battery and "detuning" the fast RAM cost $80.00 I hear. is it worth it?

Yoda · Post by **Yoda** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 5:37 am

Atomidude,

can the other ramdrives you are referring to be booted from, like the Gigabytes "sloooow" solution seems to allow?

I haven't been able to boot off from a ramdrive. And my experiences from Windows are that no matter where you put the temp files and swap file, the OS still uses the HDD quite frequently. It slows things down and is noisy. But I might be doing things and having the settings the wrong way.

One would think that by moving the OS and all the temp/swap files to a bootable SDD and having everything else on a network share (and perhaps some data, like for example rarely used programs, on a fast, local HDD which would spin down quickly) there would be no need for constant local HDD access and things would be relatively quiet.

You are probably right about the CPU utilization, though. But would it be constantly higher, even when idling (compared to a system residing on a HDD, which is connected to the SATA-bus, too) or would it simply seem to utilize the CPU more because it is able to process things quicker (and not wait for the HDD)? I would hope that in a multicore/prosessor enviroment, I would still be better off letting the fast SDD choke (at least one core of a) prosessor than letting the prosessor wait for the slow HDD.

Wbr, Tatu

sgtpokey · Post by **sgtpokey** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 5:48 am

There's also cost involved. 2 gig sticks + a mobo that supports it may actually be MORE expensive than this solution (btw, where CAN you buy 2 gig sticks, quick check on newegg comes up with none).

As yoda said, you should be able to boot from this drive. This opens up a lot more potential scenarios for use.

CPU utilization would be higher during reads/write because the CPU is being used more efficiently (as in it doesn't have to wait as much for the REALLY SLOW physical hard drives to write/read) so CPU utilization is a bit of a red herring. IIRC MikeC touches on this topic in the cenatek review I keep referring to.

Bottom line is to the System and the OS this will appear as a 100% normal hard drive that happens to be the fastest 4 gig bootable hard drive ever.

sgtpokey · Post by **sgtpokey** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 5:56 am

Oops,
The cenatek rocketdrive review I linked to earlier didn't link correctly.

The correct link is:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article49-page1.html

Ducky · Post by **Ducky** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 6:31 am

Edward Ng wrote: You guys, this is not a flash memory product; this is based on RAM, which is completely different in performance profile. Flash is designed to retain its data for long period of time without battery backup; RAM requires power to retain its charge and consequently the stored data. RAM is much faster than flash memory, and as such, flash memory products will not provide an accurate guage of performance here. Flash memory also has a limited number of writes, whereas RAM can be written to as many times as you like without harm. Both, access time and maximum transfer rate are exemplary; flash storage has quite low maximum transfer rate in comparison (heck, there is no comparison!).

Sorry -- the discussion drifted towards the SimpleTech flash drives for a moment. Regarding this particular RAM drive -- yes, looks like it should be hitting the max. theoretical transfer rates, since there's an actual controller to talk to that can presumably do DMA and all that.

Only thing I don't understand is... why use the PCI power pins? Is it really that much cheaper to build a PCI board vs. a power supply connector?

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 6:40 am

Ducky wrote:Only thing I don't understand is... why use the PCI power pins? Is it really that much cheaper to build a PCI board vs. a power supply connector?

Well the PCI slots + rear bracket are a decent solution to actually mounting the thing in the case. It's a toss-up whether this is a better solution than something that more closely resembles a traditional 3.5"/5.25" drive I guess.

Could it be that it *does* use the +5Vsb line, whereas a more traditional Molex would supply this? That would be very useful ... I keep my machine in S3(STR) rather than switching off, if it could use +5Vsb then periods when my machine was sleeping wouldn't contribute to the 16 hour discharge of the battery.

I'm wondering if we'll see this technology become integrated into future Gigabyte motherboards, or whether it's just a fad that'll go away once everyone has transitioned to 64-bit machines and has 8/16GB of RAM installed by default.

Project · Post by **Project** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 7:53 am

im getting a bit confused from all these posts. The battery on the card allows it to be power for 16hours when no power is supplied to the card right?. so as long as u have the card connected to the pci slot, and the power connected to the wallk, even though the computer is off, the card should be able to get power from the mobo anyways right?. So its not like u HAVE to leave your computer on 24/7. I think thats how WOL works. Even if the computer is off, the network card can still get power to detect the ping to wake the computer on?

lenny · Post by **lenny** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 7:59 am

(Message regarding Ed's reply deleted since a couple of others pointed it out)

Regarding this solution vs. a software ramdisk, the software ramdisk (as Yoda pointed out) is not bootable. Some embedded systems boot off a flash image, create a RAM disk, copy the image over and then continue booting there. Someone replicated this with Win9x but as far as I know, no one did it with XP.

Using a software RAM disk also reduces the amount of RAM your OS can use. The upper limit right now for most of us is 4GB (limitations of OS, CPU, size of DIMMs and/or # of DIMM slots on MB). I recall there's a 8 CPU / 16 core opteron that supports 128GB of RAM, but it'll probably cost significantly more than my car.

afrost · Post by **afrost** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 7:59 am

Project, yeah that is what I'm hoping for.....otherwise all the people posting about RAM drives would be right.

I want this product because it's bootable and I won't have to leave my computer on. If it can't do that then it fits into a pretty small niche.

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:07 am

Project wrote:im getting a bit confused from all these posts. The battery on the card allows it to be power for 16hours when no power is supplied to the card right?. so as long as u have the card connected to the pci slot, and the power connected to the wallk, even though the computer is off, the card should be able to get power from the mobo anyways right?. So its not like u HAVE to leave your computer on 24/7. I think thats how WOL works. Even if the computer is off, the network card can still get power to detect the ping to wake the computer on?

Yes, precisely, that would be the sensible solution. That's not to say it'll work like that, but that's certainly the ideal.

sgtpokey · Post by **sgtpokey** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:10 am

you are correct:
you don't have to leave the computer on 24/7, but the ramdrive as you said needs to have power supplied 24/7.

It actually seems like a pretty decent solution as far as supplying power goes.

But since the memory must always have power I commented that ECC memory would be good for this type of application, since without it you WILL be accumulating random bit errors over time.

Project · Post by **Project** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:14 am

also just curious, could u raid mirror this drive and just run off the ram drive, so even if u do run out of power, u would still have the a mirrored version of it?

afrost · Post by **afrost** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:17 am

not sure how it works but if you mirrored it with say a quiet 2.5" drive....would your writes slow down the speed of the 2.5" drive? I don't think that the mirror gets updated during idle processes....but I don't really know.

Although I guess if your reads are at the speed of the RAM drive then it would still be pretty cool for things like loading the OS and loading levels in your favorite game like HL2 or something.....

sgtpokey · Post by **sgtpokey** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:27 am

If you're talking RAID-1 mirrors, the idea should be a non-starter. You're slowing yourself down to the hard drive's speed (writes wait for both media to complete), AND wasting the space on the hard drive (it mirrors the 4gb and ignores the rest of the hard drive space).

The ramdrive probably isn't a solution for anything you'd feel compelled to mirror; you can do periodic backups to some conventional drive or flash media but really that's about it.

I think of the ramdrive as a windows xp boot drive and temp storage space; anything else should go on network storage or conventional media.

afrost · Post by **afrost** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:32 am

If this question is off topic just ignore it, but could somebody explain the best way to make a backup of a boot OS to a different HDD so that if it's lost it can be restored? Would you just use something like Norton Ghost?

sgtpokey · Post by **sgtpokey** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:39 am

...but could somebody explain the best way to make a backup of a boot OS to a different HDD so that if it's lost it can be restored? Would you just use something like Norton Ghost

Yep. it's fairly easy with ghost or other software and their tutorials can walk you through it.

ddrueding1 · Post by **ddrueding1** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:46 am

sgtpokey wrote:
...but could somebody explain the best way to make a backup of a boot OS to a different HDD so that if it's lost it can be restored? Would you just use something like Norton Ghost
Yep. it's fairly easy with ghost or other software and their tutorials can walk you through it.

IIRC, some of the newer programs can do it from within the OS; so volitile system drives are more feasible.

lenny · Post by **lenny** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 9:09 am

sgtpokey wrote:But since the memory must always have power I commented that ECC memory would be good for this type of application, since without it you WILL be accumulating random bit errors over time.

You're right, ECC would be useful. What's even better is if the ASIC / microcontroller implements some sort of parity on the data. Somehow, for $50 (or $80 or even $100) I seriously doubt they'll implement it.

Arcticfox · Post by **Arcticfox** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 9:15 am

Found a site with some benchmarks:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/31 ... e_ramdisk/

While I am dissappointed that it is only SATA-I, I guess I can't complain about a completely silent, bootable RAM drive with 3 times the average bandwidth of a normal hard drive and no seek time.

Edward Ng · Post by **Edward Ng** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 11:05 am

wim wrote:hey with a ram drive, what happens if the ram lose power by some psu/battery cock-up? it mean you have to setup OS again from some image, right? it would make me feel really weird thinking of my work there kindof electrically treading water. i suppose people would only use this to actually run the OS, and keep any/all 'keeping' information on network.

Edward Ng wrote:You guys, blablabla
ahem, those guys talking about BobDog's thing. but it's good of you to insult everyone's intelligence with the little ram/flash tutorial.
(or did you just mean to be pointing out how OT BobDog dragging the thread?)

I'm talking about anyone who thought the Gigabyte card would perform like BobDog's flash drive.

You think I'd go and insult anyone's intelligence? Oh I'd love to start shit up again with you; that'd be bloody fun. You think only unintelligent people would get confused by BobDog's reference to a flash drive when discussing the topic item? Then you're interpreting things in your favor, because I don't think so;--who's insulting whose intellience then? I felt the need to clarify that we are not talking about a flash drive, and I did not do it because I think anyone is unintelligent--do you?!? I did it because the discussion is about a RAM-based device and I wanted to make that clear. Or is it that you personally feel insulted by that? So it makes you feel like your intelligence has been insulted when I'm here to help things out? What the hell is your problem? Again you choose to pick at me for no appropriate reason whatsoever and you still have not been willing to answer me when I ask wtf is your problem. I cannot help you if you won't help me!

-Ed

flloyd · Post by **flloyd** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 11:37 am

"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.

If the PC is unplugged, the iRam has an on-board battery for emergency power that can last up to 12 hours, he said."

Sounds awesome, just what I was looking for.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/ ... ows_1.html

afrost · Post by **afrost** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 11:47 am

Sweet! I want one bad now....that is exactly what I want....this will be a great product.

You could set up one OS on a normal HDD that you do important things with, and a stripped down clean OS on the RAM card for when you are only browsing the internet or playing your favorite game.....

lots of cool options with this...