Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 3:50 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
Armed with four 1GB sticks, we ran into more than a few cases where the i-RAM's size limitations made it impractical for use in our system. Although 4GB is enough for a good deal of applications, an 8GB card would get far more use. Based on the size of applications and games that we tried installing on the card, we'd say that 8GB would be the sweet spot - which unfortunately would either take two cards or much more expensive DIMMs. We wouldn't recommend going with a 2GB partition unless you have a very specific usage model that you know won't use any more. With only 2GB, we quickly found ourselves very constrained for space. The past few years of having much more storage than we could ever ask for has unfortunately made us forget about how tough things can get with only a couple of GBs of space.Although the card is presently cramped with just four DIMM slots, one option for Gigabyte is to introduce a two-slot version with support for eight DIMMs. The problem that we foresee most people running into is that older memory may be plentiful, but is usually smaller in size. By the time current Athlon 64 users migrate to DDR2, they may have a handful of 512MB or 1GB sticks laying around, but presently, the only spare memory that you're most likely to have is a few 128MB or 256MB DDR modules from older builds. Without being able to re-use older memory, the cost of outfitting an i-RAM card with a full 4GB of memory starts getting expensive. At $90 per gigabyte of memory, you're talking about $360 just in memory costs, plus another $150 for the card itself. For most folks, that's a pretty steep entry fee, but then again, if you've just splurged on a GeForce 7800 GTX, then maybe your budget can handle it.
But that right there hits the nail on the head; by no means is the i-RAM a cheap upgrade, but then again, neither is an Athlon 64 X2, or a brand new 7800 GTX, or an SLI motherboard. If you put it in perspective, an i-RAM with 4GB of brand new DDR400 memory isn't all that expensive compared to some of the other upgrades that we've recommended recently. So the question then becomes, is Gigabyte's i-RAM as important to your overall system performance as an Athlon 64 X2 or a GeForce 7800 GTX?
For gamers, there is a slight improvement in level load times if you keep your game on the i-RAM. Most games will fit on a 4GB card, but as we noticed during our testing, not all will. The reduction in load times isn't nearly as dramatic as we had originally thought. It seems as if level load times are actually more affected by CPU and platform performance than just disk performance.
Those users who have one or two applications that occupy all of their time, and tend to take a while to load or work with due to constant disk access would be more than happy with the i-RAM. By far, the biggest performance improvements we saw when using the i-RAM were obviously with disk intensive operations such as file copying. If your applications or usage models involve a lot of data movement without much manipulation, then the i-RAM may very well be what you need.
At the same time, for all of the situations where the i-RAM was quite useful, there were a number where it wasn't. Multitasking performance went up, but only in one out of the three Winstone tests, and even then, it's going to be rather tough to install a large number of applications on the i-RAM due to its size limitations, so your multitasking performance benefits will be numbered. Game load times weren't always improved by a great deal and as we saw with the Business and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone tests, sometimes you are better off with a faster CPU than with the i-RAM.
The important thing to focus on is that thanks to Gigabyte's battery system, data-loss was never an issue during our use of the card; and despite the lack of ECC memory support, we never had any data corruption during our testing.
In the end, the i-RAM is an interesting addition to a system, but it's usefulness will truly vary from one user to the next. With a bit more capacity, and especially for those users who happen to have a few 1GB sticks laying around, the i-RAM could be a very powerful addition to your system. Hats off to Gigabyte for making something useful, and we can't wait to see rev 2...
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Sea Shadow - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I wonder if the OS is the limiting factor. They should run some tests using other os *cough* linux *cough*.What would be really neat is if they could design an i-Ram device that uses 2 HDD bays and supported 8+ GB of ram and ran from a standard molex.
sprockkets - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
You people think about using Knoppix and copying to the drive? For that matter, that and stuff like damnsmalllinux and such can be run totally from system ram.Instead of using this though for a slient drive, you are better off using flash memory drives for that.
ViRGE - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Unfortunately if they did that, it would mean that your computer could never be turned off. As noted in the review, the card is currently still powered even if the machine is "off", due to the fact that when a modern ATX computer is off, it's actually more of a super-standby mode that leaves a few choice items powered on for wake-on events(LAN/modems, and the power button of course). All Gigabyte is doing here is taping in to the 3.3v line on the PCI slot that wake-on power is provided through, which is enough to keep the device powered up even when the system is in its diminished state.Molex plugs on the other hand are completely powered down when the system is "off", so it would be running off of battery power in this case. A lot of us leave our systems on 24/7 anyhow, but I still think they'd have a hard time selling a device that would require your computer to be off for no more than 16 hours at a time.
Gatak - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
They could use the USB power. On most motherboards you can enable with a jumper or BIOS to supply standby power to the USB. Often the setting is called "Wake on USB" or "Wake on Keyboard" etcreactor - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
"What would be really neat is if they could design an i-Ram device that uses 2 HDD bays and supported 8+ GB of ram and ran from a standard molex."Was thinking something similar myself as i was reading.
I think once ram modules are 4gb or larger, then this could be very useful. But not until it gets updated with sata2, ddr400 etc. When the time comes to build an HTPC then ill give this another look.
Nice article.
ranger203 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Not to shabby, but i was honestly expecting like 3 second boots, & 5 second game load times... why is there only a 20% speed increase in some areas?Griswold - Thursday, July 28, 2005 - link
Because the data still has to be processed after being loaded - bandwith is obviously not the biggest bottleneck here.forwhom - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
What I would be very interested in seeing is the performance of the thing using it as the source for encoding a dvd/mpeg... Most encoders are heavily disk-based and if it could reduce the time significantly it might be worth while - assuming that eventually they come out with one big enough to hold the source. There's now reasonable CPU encode performance, just have to get the data to/from it... maybe the i-drive would help..highlandsun - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Hmmm, the WD Raptor has a sustained transfer rate of 72MB/sec. So on a freshly formatted drive, with no fragmentation, it should still be half the speed of the iRam. But at $200 for a 74GB drive, then you could get a pair of these running in RAID0, which would run at around 140MB/sec anyway, and still have spent less than the cost of the iRam and 4GB of DDR DIMMs. It definitely seems like this product falls short.The use of PCI 3.3V standby power is clever. Perhaps a future version should just use a dummy PCI card to provide the power, connected to a 5" drive-size case with many more DIMM slots. If you can't cram at least 16 DIMMs in there, then the ability to use old memory is kind of wasted, since the old modules will have such small capacities.
Ultimately I think this type of product will always be a failure.
What they should do instead is make it a pass-through cache for a real SATA drive. So you plug the SATA controller into it, and plug it into a real SATA drive, and it caches all I/O operations to the real drive. That's the only way that you can get meaningful benefit out of only 4GB of memory. A card like this would turn any SATA drive into a speed demon; 4GB is definitely a decent size for most caching purposes.
highlandsun - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Of course the next logical step is to put the DIMM slots on the SATA controller card, so that access to cached data occurs at real memory speeds, not just SATA bus speed. This would only be a useful product for folks stuck on 32-bit systems, because otherwise it would be best to just increase the system memory instead. But there are plenty of 32-bit systems out there that would benefit from the approach.