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

Caudipteryx zoui · Post by **Caudipteryx zoui** » Tue Jun 21, 2005 11:37 am

This product appeals to the geek in me, and indeed I was excited when reading the opening specs in this thread; a price point astronomically lower than similar products like the Rocket Drive, what amounts to bootable SATA, access in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds, and of course the sexy silence of solid-state storage. This even fits my current project where I have the most space (PCI slots).

My main concern is the 4GB limit, closely followed by the price.

4GB isn't enough for me. There are too many inconveniences when buying a drive that can't fit my OS and all my apps: I don't want to buy another HDD for apps due to performance, space, noise, and cost concerns, I don't want to put my apps on my storage drive due to peformance and organizational concerns, I won't run XP Home or XP Pro Lite Whatever, and I won't go back to the days of worrying whether or not I can fit new apps on my drive, let alone keep track of 'important' apps on one drive and the rest somewhere else. 8GB would provide me plenty of comfort but would certainly be too pricey for me.

I tend to build budget-oriented PCs that serve me as all-in-one solutions for all my computer needs, with each iteration serving as my main rig. I also classify SPCR users into 3 main types: those who at least start out with (near) absolute silence in mind and build the most powerful pc for their needs from there, those who start out wanting the most powerful pc for their needs and quiet what they can from there, and those who aim to build extremely quiet PCs with decent power for their needs from the getgo. I also see every degree in between, but I digress.

For the sake of this discussion (If I can call it that; This has been the only SPCR thread I have disliked reading), I see this product as appealing to those in the first two categories, or those with different computing habits and desires. It sure looks to be quiet and it sure looks to be fast, but for a budget-oriented, 'middle-road' silencer with my habits it's just not ready. I'll have to pass on this if it's released this summer; maybe for mynext build this tech will have what I'm looking for.

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Tue Jun 21, 2005 5:24 pm

Natronomonas wrote:But... PCI-Ex16... data reads at multi gb per sec... mmmmm : )

Sorry folks but I'm failing to see what problem you think that this extra bandwidth that appears as a filesystem would solve that wouldn't be solved by plugging enough memory into your PCI-E capable Athlon64/Opteron motherboard that can cope with 4/8/16/32GB of memory in the first place. Adding more complex (read: expensive) combinations of this, that and the other interface tech just make the 64-bit mobo+RAM solution look more cost effective.

Your general computing experience is limited by two things: the size of your RAM and the seek time of your hard drive, *not* by the bandwidth of your hard drive. This device is emulating a hard-drive with zero seek time, which is why it boosts performance: extra bandwidth will buy you almost precisely nothing.

To summarise: if you are latency limited, buy one of these. If you are bandwidth limited, buy a proper motherboard with enough RAM. If you are capacity limited, buy a quiet hard-drive.

Mar. · Post by **Mar.** » Tue Jun 21, 2005 8:23 pm

nutball wrote:
To summarise: if you are latency limited, buy one of these. If you are bandwidth limited, buy a proper motherboard with enough RAM. If you are capacity limited, buy a quiet hard-drive.

However, keep in mind that most people are going to be all three.

ddrueding1 · Post by **ddrueding1** » Tue Jun 21, 2005 9:07 pm

nutball wrote:To summarise: if you are latency limited, buy one of these. If you are bandwidth limited, buy a proper motherboard with enough RAM. If you are capacity limited, buy a quiet hard-drive.

Me? I'm noise limited

This will eliminate the last source of noise from my system. True silence? Priceless.

Oh, and the performance won't hurt, either.

lenny · Post by **lenny** » Tue Jun 21, 2005 9:35 pm

ddrueding1 wrote:True silence? Priceless.

True silence? Very very pricey!

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 5:47 pm

"True silence? Very very pricey! Very Happy"
^bah, not always!

"But many companies seem to report external transfer rates (USB, internet, etc.) in kilobits/megabits, which can be deceiving."
i'm sure that is pretty much the *only* reason. here, at a PC forum, and a specialist (non-n00bish) one at that, and people still get duped. this is how firewire has died cuz everyone (me included for a long time) thought it was slower than usb2; 400 vs 480, but USB is the burst rate, firewire is the sustained transfer rate.. marketing can be very decietful.

"The beauty of this though is as it uses the SATA interface for communication it looks like a regular drive to the OS - whichever flavour you run. Otherwise, you'd need special drivers etc to make it work as a boot/swap drive etc.

So while the extra bandwidth would be great, it would potentially be much harder to utilise in a wide-ranging fashion.

But... PCI-Ex16... data reads at multi gb per sec... mmmmm : )"

well
1) PCI-E x1 is the replacement for PCI
2) PCI-E x16, is the same technology, only 16 lanes
3) u can have PCI controller cards which connect to ur HDD; so a drive can look like a regular drive to the OS, whilst all the data is being transferred down the PCI 'lane'.. in the future (maybe now) as PCI dissapears these will need to be on PCI-E x1 slots, so the tech must be there.

"Something else to take into consideration is whether PCI 16x slots provide +5Vsb. I'd assume they do, but I don't know for sure."
again, working on the principle than PCI-e x1 is replacing PCI (and x16 is the same as), there must be something like this which would work..

"It seems like you'd probably be getting the best "bang for your buck" by buying two of these things, and filling up the slots of each with a bunch of cheapo 512MB sticks"
that would leave u in the messy situation of having 2x 2gb drives! maybe u could use raid (some #) so that they are seen as one drive.. but that would be messy i'd think.. i am just starting to see the price of 1GB sticks come down here, there are (literally) 1 or 2 brands which are getting close to 2x the price of 512mb.
might work for some thou.. having said all that, we certainly can't get 512mb ram for £25, let alone $25

nutball, its bootable.. ram isn't.. it saves stuff.. ram doesn't..

"Your general computing experience is limited by two things: the size of your RAM and the seek time of your hard drive, *not* by the bandwidth of your hard drive. This device is emulating a hard-drive with zero seek time, which is why it boosts performance: extra bandwidth will buy you almost precisely nothing."
very good point, we dont transfer more than 300MB/s very often (althou to say we aren't limited by sustained tranfer rates of HDDs i'm not so sure).. but i dont see the harm in having a version which is 10x faster.. for exampe the smallest u may notice is maybe 0.1s? so thats 30MB transferred.. which is very common; so higher bandwidth may give better performance at the margins. plus if u want to do something like save all ur ram (hibernate style) to disk then that will change a few seconds into practically instantly.

still see no reason why *not* to have a PCI-E x16 card.. gigabyte are pretty experienced with it afterall..

and, i *would* like to see this thing be able to adjust voltages for the ram.. if its only going to run @ 100mhz (/pc1600), then any pc3200 could surely be reduced voltage decently below 2.5v (has anyone ever undervolted ram?? can any boards do that?).. if anyone was planning to run this thing as part of a no moving parts system, then the heat produced by 4+ extra ram sticks is very significant! working on cpu principles i guess it would be half the heat, but voltage adjustment would be very handy still.

how do i email (someone important) at gigabyte?

dan · Post by **dan** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 10:36 pm

given that a typical configuration of this device is 2-4gb, it's clearly storage bound.

what kind of software/applications are mostly latency bound?
from what i read, the suggestion was put forth to put windows xp for fast boot-up. would you endores this recommendation for the majority of users of everyday use?

perplex · Post by **perplex** » Thu Jun 23, 2005 8:16 am

is the 4GB an actual limit? or are people just saying that because of number of slots for sticks? because you can get 4GB sticks i think, definately 2GB.

derekva · Post by **derekva** » Thu Jun 23, 2005 10:03 am

perplex wrote:is the 4GB an actual limit? or are people just saying that because of number of slots for sticks? because you can get 4GB sticks i think, definately 2GB.

There are 4GB PC1600 sticks, but you're looking at a cool grand per stick. By the time you have populated your RAM drive, you're probably about the same cost as a true IDE flash disk of the same capacity.

-Derek

BobtheGreatZeta · Post by **BobtheGreatZeta** » Thu Jun 23, 2005 11:04 am

It seems that everyone has been concentrating on the limited file space available (with good reason)... With all the high performance CPU's (esp. dual-core) would Windows' built in HD compression utility be a viable solution? I'm not sure it would be possible to isolate the decompression/compression onto one core with Windows for max performance, but the sheer bandwidth might be enough to overcome any lag from its use... Any opinions on this matter? Could Linux do something like this (esp. if Windows can't)?

Thanks
BTGZ

dan · Post by **dan** » Thu Jun 23, 2005 6:45 pm

wouldn't that increasse latency defeating the purpose of the product?

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Thu Jun 23, 2005 8:28 pm

dan wrote:wouldn't that increasse latency defeating the purpose of the product?

Not if silence is your goal.

dan · Post by **dan** » Fri Jun 24, 2005 7:40 am

since is my goal, but even with compression i would think most spcr users would still need a hard drive.

Edward Ng · Post by **Edward Ng** » Fri Jun 24, 2005 1:26 pm

Combine the solutions. Use the RAM card for OS/apps and use a laptop HDD completely muffled in an enclosure for storage. I guarantee you this is inaudible. At that level one should be more worried about coil whine or monitor hum/buzz.

-Ed

ATWindsor · Post by **ATWindsor** » Fri Jun 24, 2005 2:20 pm

Edward Ng wrote:Combine the solutions. Use the RAM card for OS/apps and use a laptop HDD completely muffled in an enclosure for storage. I guarantee you this is inaudible. At that level one should be more worried about coil whine or monitor hum/buzz.

-Ed

Or even better, use a fileserver connected by gig, silent and acceptble levels of space.

AtW

The Instigator · Post by **The Instigator** » Sun Jun 26, 2005 5:04 pm

I spoke to a Giigabyte product manager and he said it could take 2GB sticks to make an 8GB drive, but its very pricey and hard to find. He also told me they are testing a lot of different RAM for compatibility and they are still expecting a release of around mid-july.

dan · Post by **dan** » Sun Jun 26, 2005 6:06 pm

mid-july? is this in the US at places like newegg? what will be the product name? and about how much will it retail for, say, at newegg?

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Sun Jun 26, 2005 6:12 pm

Last I heard, it will be called i-RAM. As far as price, many of the sites I got my information from are conflicting. I've read anywhere from $50-80, but I've seen $60 most frequently.

yacoub · Post by **yacoub** » Mon Jun 27, 2005 9:43 am

I'd get it if it had an external PSU so that it wouldn't be stuck with JUST battery power. Also would like to see a BIOS software option as a way to choose to copy the data on the RAM drive to a secondary harddrive, especially in case the power goes out and you don't know when it will be coming back on.

You just backup the data to a harddrive and then if the power's out so long the battery backup doesn't make it, you still have the data on the harddisk and just copy it back over to the RAM when you get power back and boot back up without losing ALL YOUR EFFING WINDOWS SETTINGS AND DATA. Hello, how dumb is it to use a RAM drive as your primary OS drive/partition if you risk losing everything with a simple power outtage that lasts longer than the battery backup.

dan · Post by **dan** » Mon Jun 27, 2005 12:16 pm

apparently even when the pc is off it sucks electricy from a 5v line from pci

perplex · Post by **perplex** » Mon Jun 27, 2005 2:57 pm

i don't see what all the fuss is about, just install a few of http://www.emerybuilt.com/20kw.jpg in your basement

teknerd · Post by **teknerd** » Mon Jun 27, 2005 3:10 pm

i don't see what all the fuss is about, just install a few of http://www.emerybuilt.com/20kw.jpg in your basement

mmmmmmmm, one of those would be nice. Not only would you not lose your ram drive, but you could keep folding when all the other teams couldn't.

lenny · Post by **lenny** » Mon Jun 27, 2005 6:49 pm

perplex wrote:i don't see what all the fuss is about, just install a few of http://www.emerybuilt.com/20kw.jpg in your basement

But is it silent?

Caudipteryx zoui · Post by **Caudipteryx zoui** » Mon Jun 27, 2005 7:47 pm

In my earlier post I mistakenly said this card maxed out @ 4GB due to what I read in the linked bit-tech.net post:

The add-in card currently supports up to 4GB of DDR1 memory, and we understand that it is possible to link two cards together for a RAM Disk with a RAID array. That should prove to be interesting, and we wonder what transfer speeds could be achieved with two of these cards together.

I took this to mean that the total was 4GB, and I was mistaken. As I said in my original post, however, this changes nothing for me because 4GB @ 320 dollars is probing the thermosphere of my price limit as it is. For those able to afford it, I hope you enjoy it.

marius7 · Post by **marius7** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 12:38 am

The Instigator wrote:I spoke to a Giigabyte product manager and he said it could take 2GB sticks to make an 8GB drive, but its very pricey and hard to find. He also told me they are testing a lot of different RAM for compatibility and they are still expecting a release of around mid-july.

What about making them SATA II ? Why SATA only ? Is that hard to make SATA II ? Maybe u will tell this to them, but I'm sure they already know this aspect.

The Instigator · Post by **The Instigator** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 7:53 am

marius7 wrote:
The Instigator wrote:I spoke to a Giigabyte product manager and he said it could take 2GB sticks to make an 8GB drive, but its very pricey and hard to find. He also told me they are testing a lot of different RAM for compatibility and they are still expecting a release of around mid-july.
What about making them SATA II ? Why SATA only ? Is that hard to make SATA II ? Maybe u will tell this to them, but I'm sure they already know this aspect.

I specifically asked hom about SATII and PCEe, and he said they are working on it and it will be the next generation of the iRam. They are bringing the PCI/SATA to market now because the majority of users now dont have SATA II or PCIe.

Dragon Puppy · Post by **Dragon Puppy** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 8:36 am

Would an PCI riser work to expand 1 PCI slot?
Like this one: http://www.bebensee.de/shop/ssc007.jpg

Theres 1 to 3 risers too. But do these work with the +5v standby power(10W) , and if so how many cards can it keep refreshed?

And would you only have the max power to 1 slot(25W?) for all 2 or 3 slots? 3 cards with 4 dimms = 12 Dimms x Xwatts + battery charging = is 25W to little even for 2 cards?

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 12:55 pm

The Instigator wrote:
marius7 wrote:
The Instigator wrote:I spoke to a Giigabyte product manager and he said it could take 2GB sticks to make an 8GB drive, but its very pricey and hard to find. He also told me they are testing a lot of different RAM for compatibility and they are still expecting a release of around mid-july.
What about making them SATA II ? Why SATA only ? Is that hard to make SATA II ? Maybe u will tell this to them, but I'm sure they already know this aspect.
I specifically asked hom about SATII and PCEe, and he said they are working on it and it will be the next generation of the iRam. They are bringing the PCI/SATA to market now because the majority of users now dont have SATA II or PCIe.

Did he mention how many lanes it would be capable of using? 1x, 4x, 16x?

I haven't really read up much on PCI-E, but I'd assume a 16x card would be backward compatible with a 1x or 4x slot, right? The bandwidth available would just be less?

The Instigator · Post by **The Instigator** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 1:45 pm

Since it will use SATA II, the pci or pcie slot would only be used for mounting and power. I dont think the number of lanes even matters. He didnt have any specifics on what they would do in the next gen version, but he said they were working on it...I guess well have to wait and see.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 1:50 pm

My bad, guess I got a bit exited and misunderstood you. I thought that there was going to be a version that used a PCI-E bus for data transfer (I was imagining this on a PCI-E 16x slot... mmm, all that bandwidth). Thanks for the clarification.

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

Random Thought...

PCI Riser