Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 3:50 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
i-RAM for Applications
Gamers aren't the only ones plagued by long load times. There are a handful of applications that do take a reasonable amount of time to load that could be benefitted by being installed on an i-RAM card.We tried a wide variety of applications, everything from Office to Photoshop and 3ds max. What we found was the following: for the most part, the majority of applications are as fast as they are going to get on any current-generation SATA drive. We noticed no performance difference loading any of the MS Office applications on a Raptor or on the i-RAM card.
| Application Load Time Comparison (Lower is Better) | |||||
Adobe Photoshop CS |
Microsoft Outlook 2003 |
Microsoft Excel 2003 |
|||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 3.537s |
2.51s |
1.654s |
||
| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 6.037s |
2.562s |
1.765s |
||
The biggest differences that we saw were obviously with applications that took a long time to load to begin with, one of the most popular culprits being Adobe Photoshop CS (we didn't have CS2 available at the time of testing).
On a WD Raptor, Photoshop CS took about 6 seconds to load; it's not much when you time it, but it can feel like an eternity when you're actually sitting there waiting for it. The i-RAM cut the load time down to 3.537 seconds, a significant reduction, and very noticeable.
The major issue with the i-RAM and using it to install our applications on it, once again, becomes size. But it is entirely possible to keep a handful of your very frequently used applications on the card, giving you faster access to them.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
133 Comments
View All Comments
crazySOB297 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I'm surprised they didn't raid a few of them... I think you could get some huge performance.Googer - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Not to mention it is a way to also get around the 4gb siza limitation.
Hacp - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Dude the article said straight out that SATA150 was the only format supported. Read the entire article.Guspaz - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I too am dissapointed that the article lacked any mention of SATA2, which is twice as fast as SATA (300MB/s vs 150MB/s). Considering many motherboards already on the market suport SATA2, and the 300MB/s transfer rate that goes with it, it is a bit of an oversight that the articles doesn't even MENTION if the card supports SATA2 or not. Nor do they mention what they think would happen with SATA2, or if Gigabyte is likely to produce a SATA2 version. It's a weak spot in this article, I think, considering how central the bandwidth of SATA is to the performance of the i-RAM.snorbert - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
33MHz PCI only gets you 133 MB/sec theoretical, and more like 110 MB/sec in the real world. The i-RAM with SATA 1 can completely saturate a PCI bus. SATA2 would cost more to implement, and give you no speed increase at all on a 33MHz bus. If you build the card for higher-end PCI specs (e.g. 66MHz, 64 bit, 66MHz/64bit, PCI-X) then you automatically exclude most PC enthusiasts (unless they like buying server boards for their game boxes).
If they end up doing a PCI Express version, then there would be some reason to support SATA2.
This board is not a replacement for a hard drive. It would be incredibly useful as a transaction log though. Reliable (i.e. won't get lost if the machine crashes) write-behind caching for RAID 5 drives will give you a huge boost to write speeds. And the controller cards that support battery-backed write behind caching cost a lot more money than an i-RAM.
-Jason
sprockkets - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Also to reply hereKeep in mind that for many years the ide/sata controllers are NOT on the PCI bus of the southbridge, so PCI is not a limitation.
snorbert - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Actually, scratch my comment - I had not had enough coffee when I wrote it. I forgot that the PCI connector is doing essentially squat except providing power to this device. Of course you could have a SATA2 controller on a faster bus talking to this thing. But an SATA2 version would probably cost more. (because it would need a faster FPGA, newer SATA transceivers)Sorry folks,
Jason the doofus
Anton74 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
You did miss that reference; on page 2 it says "The i-RAM currently implements the SATA150 spec, giving it a maximum transfer rate of 150MB/s".Given the 1.6GB/s of the RAM, it seems completely silly not to provide a 300MB/s SATA interface instead, especially considering that the whole contraption including RAM will cost as much as 2 or more decent hard drives.
Anton
ryanv12 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
The controller on the card is not SATA-II...it can do a max of 1.6GB/s...not exactly SATA-II speeds there...Anton74 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
1.6GB/s is actually more than 5 times 300MB/s, the maximum supported by SATA-II. So 300MB/s could easily be fully utilized, and I don't understand why they didn't support that.Anton