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 as a boot drive
Since the i-RAM appears as a normal hard drive, you can install Windows on it just like you would a regular hard drive with no extra drivers (assuming that none are needed for your SATA controller).A full install of Windows XP Pro can easily fit on a 4GB i-RAM and even on a 2GB i-RAM, but you have to be careful not to install applications into the C:\Program Files directory and disable System Restore for the i-RAM drive among other precautions. Why would you ever want to install your OS on an i-RAM card? We came up with two possibilities:
First off, loading your OS on the i-RAM will reduce boot times.
| Boot Time Comparison | |||||
Windows Boot Time (Lower is Better) |
|||||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 9.12s |
||||
| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 14.06s |
||||
With a Western Digital Raptor, you can go from the boot menu to the Windows desktop in 14.06 seconds; with the i-RAM, it takes 9.12 seconds. It's not instantaneous, but it's definitely quicker and noticeable.
Our thoughts are that with further optimization, the boot process can be better tuned for very low latency storage devices such as the i-RAM, but that won't happen with any currently shipping version of Windows.
The second reason for installing your OS on an i-RAM card is a bit more specific, but one we came up with when thinking about a secondary benefit of Gigabyte's i-RAM: it's silent.
You could theoretically build a home theater computer using just the i-RAM to hold your OS and map a network drive (hopefully kept in another room) to hold all of your media (e.g. music, movies, pictures, etc.). Paired with a silent PSU and a very quiet running CPU fan (maybe even on a Pentium M based system), you can have a truly silent HTPC, thanks to the i-RAM. You'd ideally want whatever database of your media collection to be stored on the network drive and not your OS, just in case something ever happened causing your i-RAM to lose its data, but it is a viable use for Gigabyte's i-RAM.
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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.