File Copy and Archive Performance

The one area where the i-RAM truly offered impressive performance was when copying files on the i-RAM itself, mainly because a file copy is mostly an I/O bound process.

300MB File Copy
Time in Seconds (Lower is Better)
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)
25.25s
Western Digital Raptor (74GB)
77.689s

Copying a 300MB folder containing the Firefox source code from the Raptor to itself took about 77 seconds, yielding just under 4MB/s. Doing the same on the i-RAM took about 25 seconds, resulting in an average transfer rate of about 12MB/s. Note that both the Raptor and the i-RAM were far from their peak theoretical transfer rates, indicating that even the i-RAM is susceptible to some sort of performance overhead.

Next up? Copying a 693MB iso from the drive to itself:

693MB File Copy
Time in Seconds (Lower is Better)
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)
6.922s
Western Digital Raptor (74GB)
26.304s

The i-RAM averaged around 100MB/s and copied the file in 6.922 seconds. The Raptor did so in 26.305 seconds at an average of 26.3MB/s.

Finally, we copied our 1.7GB Battlefield 2 install directory:

1.76GB File Copy
Time in Seconds (Lower is Better)
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)
31.719s
Western Digital Raptor (74GB)
95.953s

Archive operations are also a lot quicker on the i-RAM. Here's how long it took to create a RAR archive of our Firefox source folder:

WinRAR Archive Creation
Time in Seconds (Lower is Better)
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)
57s
Western Digital Raptor (74GB)
70s

Un-archiving a 382MB RAR set provided a much closer competition between the Raptor and the i-RAM:

WinRAR Archive Extraction
Time in Seconds (Lower is Better)
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)
15s
Western Digital Raptor (74GB)
19s

i-RAM for Applications Overall Performance
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  • ceefka - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link

    That and/or having the possibility to install very large amounts of RAM (like 32GB) on your motherboard and BIOS settings to decide how much of that is non-volatile.

    I have a feeling this is a transitional product that while being a very nice add on to your current system, will become obsolete in 4 to 5 years. If I had to capture loads of high sampled audio (96/24), I'd want one now, though.
  • Furen - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    I was expecting something closer to the $50 price mentioned at computex... It would have been a nice device to tinker around with, but at that price (plus the price of ram) I dont think most of us will get it.
  • weazel1 - Sunday, November 4, 2012 - link

    why they have to waste pci bus speeds and run though a sata chip beyound me it should directly conect to the pci bus have its own bois and run as full fleached ram or as normal ram with a redirect to being a hdd heack u have ram disk software idea the drive is pretty useless as permenment storage why no1 could see this i do not know

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