Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 3:50 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Overall Performance
How does the i-RAM impact overall system performance? In order to find out, we installed Winstone on the drive and compared its benchmark results to the Raptor:| Overall Performance Comparison (Higher is Better) | |||||
Business Winstone 2004 |
Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 |
||||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 24.5 |
36.3 |
|||
| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 23.9 |
35.4 |
|||
What's very interesting here is that there's very little performance gain from running Winstone on the i-RAM, which tells us that Winstone isn't nearly as disk bound as we originally thought.
We wanted to run other benchmark suites on the i-RAM; however, we ran into capacity issues once again.
One of the biggest advantages of the i-RAM is its random access performance, which comes into play particularly in multitasking scenarios where there are a lot of disk accesses. In order to see if this translates into any tangible real world performance gains, we turned to the Multitasking Business Winstone tests:
"This test uses the same applications as the Business Winstone test, but runs some of them in the background. The test has three segments: in the first, files copy in the background while the script runs Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer in the foreground. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the second segment. In that segment, Excel and Word operations run in the foreground while WinZip archives in the background. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the third segment. In that segment, Norton AntiVirus runs a virus check in the background while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft FrontPage, and WinZip operations run in the foreground."
| Winstone Multitasking Performance Comparison (Higher is Better) | |||||
Test 1 |
Test 2 |
Test 3 |
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| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 5.55 |
2.98 |
3.1 |
||
| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 2.78 |
2.93 |
3.04 |
||
The biggest performance gain is in the first multitasking test, which is the file copy test while Outlook and IE run. The performance advantage here is tremendous, with the i-RAM generating a score almost twice that of the Raptor.
The rest of the tests show very little performance improvement. We'd guess that the majority of the boost in the first test is due to the file copy that takes place during the run.
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mattsaccount - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
This thing would still be useful as a pagefile in some circumstances--if all your memory slots were full and/or you had extra memory lying around. This is what I had been planning to do with it (currently have 4x512mb, plus a couple other smaller capacity DDR sticks which would be nice to use b/c for photoshop stuff). But the price is too high. I'll wait till it drops.Son of a N00b - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I would love to get two of them and run them in RAID-5 possibly...that way you also have a back up...Gatak - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
You'd need minimum 3 cards/disks for RAID-5.However, using this card as a journaling device for a normal filesystem, like ReiserFS or Reiser4 might be very beneficial. Wouldn't require much RAM either.
ukDave - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Extra things that could have been covered were:Would there be a difference with other SATA cards, such as 3Ware etc - i.e. would CPU usage make a difference perhaps?
Why not use SATA-IO (SATA-2) instead of the older and slower SATA (re: Gigabyte)?
But otherwise a very informative article, thanks Anand.
ss284 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
It would be best to wait for the second version of the card, which will hopefully have a cheaper IC as well as sata II support. Theres no doubt that the ram can do 3.0gb/s.Imagine what 2 of these in raid 0 would be like.
-Steve
SDA - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
- File copy performance is mostly a moot point, because copying files from disk to disk will go as fast as the slower of the two can, and other applications that typically require disk performance (unarchiving et al) will only see a minimal performance increase due to bottlenecks in other parts of the system (which becomes even less valuable when you consider that you won't be doing a whole lot of unarchiving to a disk that small).- Gaming benefit would be okay if it you could fit more than about one modern game on it.
- Using it as a pagefile is, as Anand noted, pointless.
- It does improve boot times, but it's not a huge difference, how many of us shut down often enough to actually be bothered by a few seconds in boot?
- It does improve app loading times slightly, but if you're opening and closing apps that take a lot to open and close, it's probably because you don't have enough system memory, so buy more memory instead.
So basically: whoopee.
DerekWilson - Wednesday, July 27, 2005 - link
I'm just gonna pick at a single point ... you could install one game to the i-ram at a time and then archive them on another drive.You get fast zip times on i-ram and a single file transfer to a magnetic disk is faster than multiple small files (moving the the archive won't take long). Just unzip the game you want to play to i-ram ...
but then ... that kinda defeats the purpose doesn't it ...
I could see this being fun to play with, but I have to agree with Anand -- it needs higher capacity before it is really useful.
Plus, I'd like to see SATA-II :-)
miketheidiot - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I don't really see anyone using this, its costs way too much for too little storage and too little performance benefit, not to mention the risk of data loss. I'll give it a look again when they get some higher bandwidth flash or something like that. this i can pass on for now.Sea Shadow - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I dunno, I could see the extreme enthusiasts getting these. I mean after all, if they have the money to buy a system with SLI 7800 GTX and FX 57 this would be pocket change.BoberFett - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I'd imagine that in some areas the CPU is still the bottleneck and for others the 150MB/sec limit of SATA may be.