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

ddrueding1 · Post by **ddrueding1** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 2:56 pm

frostedflakes wrote: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.

I cannot imagine a use for that much bandwidth to an 8GB volume? Why on earth do you think you need such a thing?

PCI = 133MB/s
ATA = 133MB/s
SATA = 150MB/s
SATAII = 300MB/s
PCIe 1x = 312.5MB/s
PCIe 16x = 5000MB/s

Considering that the average user will populate this thing to 4GB, let's see how long it would take to transfer the entire contents of the drive.

PCI = 30s
ATA = 30s
SATA = 27s
SATAII = 13.6s
PCIe 1x = 13s
PCIe 16x = 0.82s

Now I can appreciate the "neat" factor as much as the next guy, but there is no possible practical advantage of putting this thing on any faster than a SATAII connection. And the advantages of running via SATA over PCI-anything (no drivers, bootable, better compatability) far outweigh the concieveable advantages.

The Instigator · Post by **The Instigator** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 7:37 pm

Those speeds would be from RAM drive to RAM drive. Remember the bottleneck would be the HD and waiting for it to finish writing/reading. RAM drives are great for I/Os and random read and writes, but large data transfers will be limited by the hard drive youre writing to/from.

Mar. · Post by **Mar.** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 7:45 pm

The Instigator wrote:Those speeds would be from RAM drive to RAM drive. Remember the bottleneck would be the HD and waiting for it to finish writing/reading. RAM drives are great for I/Os and random read and writes, but large data transfers will be limited by the hard drive youre writing to/from.

The goal in building such a system would be, avoiding transfers from the RAM drive to slower media. They can't be done away with altogether of course, but you should attempt to limit them.

marius7 · Post by **marius7** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 9:05 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.

Anyway an SATA and SATA II port on the same pci card would have been nice (to let u choise what to use). But another ideea is to have for example the possibility to have multiple sata ports on the board. For example 4 dimms with 4 ports (1 sata for 1 dimm) and 1 port for the all 4 dimms. In this way to let u do with an single card raid 0 with 4 dimms or only an simple hdd. This way u can have an 4 GB hdd with an theoretical 600MB/s in case of sata and 1200 MB/s for sataII. Of course that 1200MB/s would be only ~1 GB/s in practice that speed would be enough for an hdd. And I think ~0.5 GB/s for sata.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 9:28 pm

ddrueding1 wrote:
frostedflakes wrote: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.
I cannot imagine a use for that much bandwidth to an 8GB volume? Why on earth do you think you need such a thing?

PCI = 133MB/s
ATA = 133MB/s
SATA = 150MB/s
SATAII = 300MB/s
PCIe 1x = 312.5MB/s
PCIe 16x = 5000MB/s

Considering that the average user will populate this thing to 4GB, let's see how long it would take to transfer the entire contents of the drive.

PCI = 30s
ATA = 30s
SATA = 27s
SATAII = 13.6s
PCIe 1x = 13s
PCIe 16x = 0.82s

Now I can appreciate the "neat" factor as much as the next guy, but there is no possible practical advantage of putting this thing on any faster than a SATAII connection. And the advantages of running via SATA over PCI-anything (no drivers, bootable, better compatability) far outweigh the concieveable advantages.

Sure it isn't neccessary, but it would be cool.

marius7, keep in mind that SATA II is backward compatible with SATA I, so two ports are not neccessary. Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but 300MBps/150MBps (for SATA II and SATA I, respectively) if the bandwidth of the entire controller, and not per device.

marius7 · Post by **marius7** » Tue Jun 28, 2005 9:56 pm

frostedflakes wrote:marius7, keep in mind that SATA II is backward compatible with SATA I, so two ports are not neccessary. Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but 300MBps/150MBps (for SATA II and SATA I, respectively) if the bandwidth of the entire controller, and not per device.

Well this is another point why SATA II was necesary. But I don't think SATA II chip is capable to transfer only 300 MB/s, I think 300MB/s per port.

The Instigator: can u ask your friend what is the acces time for such an drive (I hope is in ns

) ? And some numbers abous Raid 0 with 2 and 4 cards would be very nice.

Edit:
I thought I can use such an large RAID with 4 cards on an DFI nf4 939 but has only 2 PCI and I need one PCI for my TV tuner, so I realy need or an expansion of PCI slots or giga-byte should do PCI express cards too or another way to power this cards.

The Instigator · Post by **The Instigator** » Wed Jun 29, 2005 8:03 am

There are some graphs vs a regular SATA drive here: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/31 ... e_ramdisk/, but that is the only info regarding measured sppeds I have been able to find. I didnt get any info regarding RAID speeds, but he did say it would defenitiely work.

I will be calling them next Friday to follow up and see when they are coming out, as my company is interested in getting them in for review. If we do get some in early, I will be sure to follow up with some numbers.

sgtpokey · Post by **sgtpokey** » Wed Jun 29, 2005 10:01 am

Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but 300MBps/150MBps (for SATA II and SATA I, respectively) [is] the bandwidth of the entire controller, and not per device.

Frosted, I for one, believe you are correct. This is the reason why I don't understand people wanting to RAID-0 this thing: it's already at it's speed limit...

ddrueding1 · Post by **ddrueding1** » Wed Jun 29, 2005 10:11 am

The Instigator wrote:There are some graphs vs a regular SATA drive here: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/31 ... e_ramdisk/, but that is the only info regarding measured sppeds I have been able to find.

Looks like the i-RAM maxed out a PCI-based SATA controller on that graph...I'll take it

marius7 · Post by **marius7** » Wed Jun 29, 2005 10:46 pm

sgtpokey wrote:
Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but 300MBps/150MBps (for SATA II and SATA I, respectively) [is] the bandwidth of the entire controller, and not per device.
Frosted, I for one, believe you are correct. This is the reason why I don't understand people wanting to RAID-0 this thing: it's already at it's speed limit...

I think is per port. It's imposible to have 4 HDD on an SATA chip and to have only 37.5 MB/s per port. This is absurde. Where is the advantage of SATA ? It will be like ATA 33. So I think is 150 MB per port.

marius7 · Post by **marius7** » Wed Jun 29, 2005 10:48 pm

The Instigator wrote:I will be calling them next Friday to follow up and see when they are coming out, as my company is interested in getting them in for review. If we do get some in early, I will be sure to follow up with some numbers.

I'm waiting for some RAID numbers(access time and bandwidth) as soon as it's possible.

teknerd · Post by **teknerd** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 12:11 am

doing a raid configuration in order to improve speed would only make sense on a system that has its SATA ports integrated into the chipset. On a board that uses an add-in controller (such as a silicon image controller) the SATA controller is usually hooked up via the PCI Bus, which can be completely saturated with a single iRam. Integrated SATA ports on the other hand are connected directly to the northbridge and can actually provide 150MB/s per port, rather than 133MB/s for all of the ports combined.

(one note: add in cards running on a high bandwith bus, such as PCI-X do not suffer the same limitations described above).

The Instigator · Post by **The Instigator** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 7:06 am

Well we are planning on running the cards in either a new ATI Crossfire or N-Force 4 mobo which with both have native support for SATA II integrated into them. We really want the SATA II i-rams but they wont be out for some time it seems. It going to be teh roxxorz!!!!!1 either way though.

Flipper · Post by **Flipper** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 7:35 am

There's a full review here: http://www.hkepc.com/hwdb/iramdisk-gbt-1.htm

I guess it is the first one. This i-Ram is very very promising

The Instigator · Post by **The Instigator** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 8:09 am

WOW. Thats one of the best reviews Ive ever read.

This is good news though

lenny · Post by **lenny** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 9:17 am

Flipper, thanks for the link! Great first post and Welcome to SPCR Forums!

There's certainly a lot of details in that review. Here's some extracts from my painfully slow reading:

1. 12V is used to recharge battery. Implication : when computer is off, battery is not being recharged. Since rechargeables self discharge slowly when not being topped up, I wonder how effective the battery is going to be when system has been off for some time, before power is removed.

2. Battery is recharged to 80% in rapid mode, then slowly topped up to 100%. Total charging takes 5 hours. In sleep mode drive draws 100 mA. With a 1600 mAH battery this theoretically means it should last for 16 hours.

3. The PCI slot's 3.3V standby is used to keep DRAM refreshed when main power is off. Battery is used when 3.3V SB is not available. Various tests are conducted with the expected result.

4. BIOS auto detects drive and memory amount.

5. Windows boot up time compared to Seagate ST3800013AS SATA 80GB - 6.42 sec vs. 13.17 sec, timed using a stopwatch from the moment Windows logo is seen till Windows startup sound is played.

6. Author really likes it and wants to keep it. Says that product is still under development and is not available (no date or time frame given). Price is probably US$80 - US$100.

There's a bunch more about what timing the DRAM is running at, etc. that I did not try to follow because ultimately it is the performance that is important, and you can get that information from the graphics.

ddrueding1 · Post by **ddrueding1** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 9:48 am

lenny wrote:3. The PCI slot's 3.3V standby is used to keep DRAM refreshed when main power is off. Battery is used when 3.3V SB is not available. Various tests are conducted with the expected result.

This is a little dissapointing. How much work could it have been to have the battery be able to charge from the standby power? It's not a deal breaker by any means, but it's just a little dissapointing.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 10:05 am

Considering standby on most power supplies is ~20w, and refreshing 4GB+ of RAM would suck up a good chunk of this, it probably wasn't possible to use standby voltage for the battery without potentially overloading the rail. Just my guess.

technical · Post by **technical** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 10:13 am

Gigabyte i-Ram with 4GB or 8GB is a nice, extremely fast and extremely expensive toy. Without good software support only people using Photoshop can truly benefit from it. If we want silent computing we need to boot operating system and run programs from i-Ram.

Simplest system that I can think of would need a new boot loader.
Boot loader could allow us to choose:
A) Start Windows from hard drive.
B) Copy C-drive image from hard drive to i-Ram. Turn hard drive off. Start Windows from i-Ram.

Also we need separate software which if needed will copy C-drive image from i-Ram to hard drive. Or maybe it should automatically save C-drive image from i-Ram to hard drive every time we shutdown computer. (We could have serious problems if computer should crash while saving data from i-Ram to hard drive.)

The Instigator · Post by **The Instigator** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 11:44 am

Ummm the iRAM is bootable. It uses the SATA bus. Thats why there is such a buzz about it. Did you read any of this thread?

perplex · Post by **perplex** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 12:49 pm

The Instigator wrote:...Did you read any of this thread?

probably not considering it's his first post - but still no need to poke his neck with your beak!

technical · Post by **technical** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 11:56 pm

The Instigator wrote:Ummm the iRAM is bootable. It uses the SATA bus. Thats why there is such a buzz about it. Did you read any of this thread?

Sorry if I did not present my problem clearly. I have read all that has been written about it.
I know it is bootable device and because it has battery it can hold data during power outbreak. Still I would not trust it completely. That’s the reason why I would like to be able to save C-drive image from i-Ram to hard disk and load it back to i-Ram if needed.
But maybe this is just an issue of using backup software and not directly related to i-Ram.

marius7 · Post by **marius7** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:05 am

Well, seems very good to me.
The Instigator I'm counting on u for an raid 0 setup (maybe with 4 card if it's not too much)

Flipper · Post by **Flipper** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:14 am

I may be wrong, but i think that you cannot install multiple i-ram card, because it would need too much power to charge. This would be why they only accept 4GB. Anyway, time will tell

The Instigator · Post by **The Instigator** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:52 am

According to the Gigabyte rep I talked to, he said they are RAID-able. Im going to try it regardless. FWIW, we have been talking to Corsair about getting in RAM and they are going to contact Gigabyte about when it is available and possible moving us up the chain in getting some review samples in. They should go along nicely with the 2 Raptors and 4 320GB (will be striped to make over 1 TB of storage)WD hard drives sitting on my desk. We have 2 FX-57s, an X2 4800+ and 2 7800GTX cards that will be going in a Koolance built water cooled Lian-Li V1200 case.

acaurora · Post by **acaurora** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 8:20 am

That koolance system, I'm not sure if it can handle all that.... -.-;; I believe the Lian Li 1200 is based upon the old EXOS, not the EXOS II.

The Instigator · Post by **The Instigator** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 9:47 am

Heres the link: http://www.koolance.com/shop/product_in ... cts_id=180

Its cooling unit sits between the EXOS and the EXOS II.

acaurora · Post by **acaurora** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 10:02 am

nevermind, that's the Koolance EXOS II, it probably can handle it all.

Edwood · Post by **Edwood** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 12:14 am

Any news from any resellers as to when they will receive stock of the iRAM "drives"? Particulary in the USA?

-Ed

perplex · Post by **perplex** » Wed Jul 06, 2005 1:55 am

http://theinquirer.net shows a link saying "gigabyte iRAM tested" but when you click the link i can't find it

direct: http://theinquirer.net/?article=24399