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

[|Romeo|]

Addressing the previous questions about a PCI to PCI-E adapter:
Unfortunately they do not exist. One of the technologies is a paralell data structure while the other is serial and hence they are incompatible.

http://focus.ti.com/docs/pr/pressreleas ... Id=sc04187

I think they can exist... To my knowledge no one has released a 3GIO-PCI converter card (or done any of the more interesting things listed in that document). But it can be done.

[teknerd]

based on my understanding of that press release (which i hope is right), that adapter is a bridge chip created for motherboard manufacturers to put pci express slots on a board without engineering a new chipset. It doesnt seem to be a card you can just slip in and directly convert a pci slot to pci-e.

Again, i could be wrong, so if anyone has any more expert advice on this, any further info would be great.

[dan]

so if you use xp-lite which xp functionality would you remove to
1- pair down to fit say 1gb or 2gb or 3 or 4 gb and
2- still have functionality including word proc, games, internet, music, dvd etc

[teknerd]

xp lite is only available in certain countries (the US not included). Also it takes away so much functionality. For one, you can't use a network connection besides dial up internet; 2) you can't run more than 3 programs; and even more restricitons like these.

[lenny]

xp lite is only available in certain countries (the US not included). Also it takes away so much functionality. For one, you can't use a network connection besides dial up internet; 2) you can't run more than 3 programs; and even more restricitons like these.

I think you're referring to the crippled MS version. XP Lite also refers to this which seems to be a utility to remove unnecessary XP components.

[dan]

i personally am referring to the program that can pare down windows to fit on this card.

also would windows and apps installed on this card be faster and more responsive, or is it only boot-up?

[teknerd]

hehe, sorry about that. I was referring to the crippled ms version.

[lenny]

also would windows and apps installed on this card be faster and more responsive, or is it only boot-up?

I'd think it depends on the application.

For example, if your bootup sequence includes a lot of waiting for devices to come online, or, say, wait for a DHCP response, bootup will not be significantly sped up.

Even loading applications may not be much faster. Some games, for example, highly compress their data, and uncompressing them may take up much more time than loading them from disk.

Photoshop use their own swap file. Setting the PS swap file to the RAM disk will significantly increase the speed when working on large files. Encoding video is another app where there is significant disk I/O, although with an hour of DV occupying 13GB, I'm not sure how much use 4GB of ramdisk will be.

Check reviews of the Raptor drives to see what apps benefit, and by how much. It should give you a good idea.

[dan]

thanks for the warning, i thought that the reason windows isn't very responsive is due to the HD

[teknerd]

it usually is because of the hard drive. Using a Ram Drive will dramatically increase certain parts of the bootup, such as the part where you see a black screen with the windows xp logo. Also, when opening windows and menus and such in xp, anything that requires drive access, you will see a speed boost.
As lenny pointed out there are certain programs and situations that are cpu limited rather than disk limited (or limited by some other factor such as waiting for an external device to turn on).

Therefore, you will see the biggest performance boost when using this in a system that has at least 512MB to 1GB of RAM and a fairly modern processor, since all those components together will help the card's fast access be used well.

[nutball]

thanks for the warning, i thought that the reason windows isn't very responsive is due to the HD

Generally it is. The comment above about DHCP and other things is true enough, but the HD is responsible for the bulk of the sluggishness.

Another problem is that Windows tries to load all of the boot-time applications, tray icons, etc. at the same time (or rather it did pre-XP, not 100% sure with XP). This guarantees that the HD will thrash. At one point I found a little application called StartAfter or something, which I scripted to start all the applications a few seconds apart. The result was much quicker boot times!

[dan]

hi,
i wonder why opening a menu would require drive access. i would imagine clicking on icons and loading programs require drive access and hence things would speed up the responsiveness of the system.

Also, when opening windows and menus and such in xp, anything that requires drive access, you will see a speed boost.

[StarfishChris]

The start menu is the only thing that requires disk access as it accesses a folder. Application menus shouldn't do it as they're stored in memory.

[Yoda]

What do you think, could one PCI-slot provide juice for more than one of these, if the wiring could be done somehow?

Wbr, Tatu

[lenny]

What do you think, could one PCI-slot provide juice for more than one of these, if the wiring could be done somehow?

I don't know how much power a stick of DRAM requires, but a PCI slot can provide up to 25W. The 5V SB will be more of an issue, since that's only 2A (10W) to be shared among the entire system.

[dan]

i like the idea of really fast boot and responsiveness.

would it be possible to design it so that the system can simultaneous access the memory from the pci slot AND sata slot?

[nutball]

would it be possible to design it so that the system can simultaneous access the memory from the pci slot AND sata slot?

I guess anything is possible, but it begs the question ... why would you want to?

[mb2]

"Even loading applications may not be much faster. Some games, for example, highly compress their data, and uncompressing them may take up much more time than loading them from disk."
i would suggest that if a modern program (or game) highly compressed their data, it would be for good reason- ie it was a large amount of data, and (with normal hard drives) it sped up the loading process for most people (including those with average CPUs).
it would have to load and *then* start decompression if i am thinking right?
therefore whilst loading might not be as instant as it would be otherwise, it would still be significantly faster

also, for those wondering about powering this outside of a PCI slot, the extra PCI 'key' on the PCI riser here (scroll down, http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=287&p=3 ) i can only assume must handle power requirements (as otherwise the PCI x2 riser could be happily plugged into only one slot?)
but intercepting the battery looks far easier.

"I guess anything is possible, but it begs the question ... why would you want to?"
i guess dans thinking is that then you would get the 300MB/s + 133MB/s.. i can't imagine it would end up working as being actually faster in the real world, if atall.

i'm telling you, they need this thing on PCI-E x16

[BobtheGreatZeta]

Couldn't Gigabyte potentially utilize the internal USB 2.0 connections on the motherboard for something of this nature? I know Windows doesn't like booting from USB, but wouldn't a PCI boot and then a switchover to the other connector increase performance?

Thanks,
BTGZ

[frostedflakes]

There wouldn't be much point; USB 2.0 is even slower than PCI or SATA.

[dan]

"Even loading applications may not be much faster. Some games, for example, highly compress their data, and uncompressing them may take up much more time than loading them from disk."
i would suggest that if a modern program (or game) highly compressed their data, it would be for good reason- ie it was a large amount of data, and (with normal hard drives) it sped up the loading process for most people (including those with average CPUs).
it would have to load and *then* start decompression if i am thinking right?
therefore whilst loading might not be as instant as it would be otherwise, it would still be significantly faster

also, for those wondering about powering this outside of a PCI slot, the extra PCI 'key' on the PCI riser here (scroll down, http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=287&p=3 ) i can only assume must handle power requirements (as otherwise the PCI x2 riser could be happily plugged into only one slot?)
but intercepting the battery looks far easier.

"I guess anything is possible, but it begs the question ... why would you want to?"
i guess dans thinking is that then you would get the 300MB/s + 133MB/s.. i can't imagine it would end up working as being actually faster in the real world, if atall.

i'm telling you, they need this thing on PCI-E x16

dan is indeed thinking 300mb + 133MB/s

dan is also thinking "what can i remove from XP and still retain functionality?"

[BobtheGreatZeta]

How is USB 2.0 slower than PCI and SATA? I was under the impression that the interface can handle 480MB/sec... Is its connection to the northbridge slow or something?

[Edward Ng]

How is USB 2.0 slower than PCI and SATA? I was under the impression that the interface can handle 480MB/sec... Is its connection to the northbridge slow or something?

Not 480MB/s. It's 480Mb/s. That's also wishful thinking--it's almost never really close to 60MB/s in actual usage.

-Ed

[frostedflakes]

Yup, 480 megabits (Mb) per second. There are eight bits in a byte, so that's ~60 megabytes (MB) per second.

Most internal transfer rates are reported in megabytes... PCI, SATA, IDE, etc. But many companies seem to report external transfer rates (USB, internet, etc.) in kilobits/megabits, which can be deceiving.

[Natronomonas]

"i'm telling you, they need this thing on PCI-E x16

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 : )

[dan]

"i'm telling you, they need this thing on PCI-E x16

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 : )

would it be possible to create or write a bios both on the motherboard and on the card that would allow booting off the pci-ex16 as though it were a serial ata hard drive? then all you would need is a card that can hold 4 or 8 DIMM slots on a pci-e

[frostedflakes]

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.

[lenny]

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.

http://www.interfacebus.com/Design_PCI_ ... inOut.html

Interestingly doesn't seem to be a 5V supply there. However "3.3V Aux" should be the standby power.

[Mar.]

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. 1GB sticks still cost too much, the cheapest sometimes three times as much as a cheap 512 stick.

8x512=4 GB, which should be enough for a boot partition and the swap space/paging file. Since you shouldn't keep data in one of these things anyway, any more space would probably be overkill.

Supposing these things cost about $60USD each, that's $120 for the cards, and roughly $25 each for eight bargain-basement 512MB sticks (although they sell for cheaper), adding up to $320, for a screaming fast 4GB hard drive.

Alternatively, the cheapest 1GB sticks I could find were roughly $65. four of those and the same $60 PCI card, also adds up to $320, but with the added benefit of freeing up a PCI slot and saving some power. Of course, this assumes that the really cheap RAM I found would work with the card.

So, in terms of pricing, it depends on two things:
1) The final price of this product, the cheaper it is, the more attractive the idea of buying two gets
2) How much, if at all, the price of 1GB RAM sticks go down before this product comes out.

[dan]

if you want just 1 card with 512mb sticks
can you store windows xp, office and other apps on 2gb?

also who sells it for $25??!!