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.
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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.