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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- Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I was really surprised at how little it helped as a page file. Myself I sometimes encounter periods of slowdown due to paging that can last for several minutes where nothing can be done. I don't know if there's a common name for this but I'll call it the "page file wall". I don't know exactly how you would recreate such a tragedy in the lab. Too many apps open with too little memory obviously. But less obviously, it seems that during a period of overnight inactivity (with apps left open) windows will page a lot of stuff out to disk and you can experience the page file wall the next morning. It'd be interesting if Anand could devise a consistent "page file wall" benchmark.
As the article and many posts above suggest doubling my RAM would probably end my problems.
I still think this product (or revision 2 or 3) could bridge an obvious gap with PC's: SLOW harddisks and EXPENSIVE ram. When you run out of ram it can be like hitting a wall. It can be like crossing the country, but you go half by jet and the other half on foot. The gap should be filled with something cheaper than modern DDR and faster than harddisks. (This product is barely either.) I'd like to see a PC with 1 GB normal ram and 2GB of cheap-o 1/8 speed auxiliary ram. The OS could use this slower ram for paging with priority over paging to the harddisk. Not just for enthusiasts, but for regular beige PC's. Owners would then have another upgrade option with a better cost/benefit ratio depending on their needs.
I was waiting for a performance review of this thing and I'm so glad trusty Anandtech provided.
BTW: Long time reader (4+years), 1st time poster.
- Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I was in my local computer shop and the guy working there pointed at a stack of hardware and said some guy just dropped $8000 on a Intel 955X or whatever system that included around 16 gigs of Ram disks and I asked if it was based on ddr400 and he said no it was in fact ddr2 533 I think. A quick search on the internet found nothing about ddr2 ram drives and it defies logic to me anyway since i would think that ddr 400 would be faster due to latency issues, etc. Has anyone heard anything like this? Also the guy at the store told me that it boots in to Windows XP in 4 seconds. It sounds like a tall tale but i don't see any reason why he would be making it up as they are pretty reputable.davidlang - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
where you really suffer is on writes.any time you need to write something before you can continue the latency becomes critical. Database writes (and logging) are a perfect example of this.
Under *nix the Journal of a journaling filesystem is performance critical (although it's useually a sequential write so it is about as good as you can get.
For Database engines that have good crash recovery (MySQL is not that good at this, but Postgres or Oracle are) they need to make sure that their log gets to a safe storage media before they can consider the write completed and tell the caller that it's done.
even for an apache webserver, with normal logging apache will not return the page until the log has been written.
somu - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
As a lot of ppl have posted here, it would make sense to use this as a cache for our harddrives by making it possible to plug the harddrive into the i-ram and i-ram to the motherboard. This would overcome the 4gb limitation and we probably wouldnt need the full 4gb for cache we can use like 1gb or 2 gb. But to see more increase in performance they will need to move it to sata2 and have programmers write into their code to precache data to take full advantage of the i-ram.AngleRider - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Well it seems that modern hard drives are getting alot faster and solid state doesn't seem to help as much as it would of say, 2 or 4 years ago when we were running crusty low density HDs...
However, I am also slighty disappointed in the design...
Why put main system memory in a drive and then limit it to SATA I (not SATA2)?
I thought the whole point of a ram drive was provide maximum i/o performance...??
Second not allowing 2GB sticks doesn't make sense to me... i mean 4gb is really small.
Maybe they should of thought this,
"Gee, let's try to offer more capacity - like, golly bunny, currently available 2gb ram modules..."
Even so, if this can do 591% higher i/o performance than a raptor in ipeak business winstone, then i'm sure there are ways to utilize this in computing tasks...
Also if u put the os on it u wont ever need to defrag...
Nice, but expensive for now ... expensive doesn't mean its crap.. just weakly spec'd to my mind for now...
Why do something like this and then water it down?
D
UNCjigga - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I think the disappointing benchmarks ought to say something about current OS's suitability to the iRAM, and not iRAM's capabilities. I really think this is an idea ahead of its time. Windows XP isn't tuned for solid-state storage, the FPGA chip on the iRAM isn't the best solution, and the SATA interface itself is a bottleneck. If Windows Vista and future BIOSes had support for PCIe storage, imagine a version of iRAM that had a straight PCIe interface supporting the full 1.6Gb/s or more depending on the type of memory you put on, and 8Gb or more memory thanks to 64bit addressing.Windows Vista will already have support for hybrid drives (NAND+platter) so the caching and paging routines will be optimized for solid-state storage. I actually think iRAM might be better than hybrid drives because 1) you can use existing drives with it, 2) iRAM is expandable (up to a limit), 3) DDR is faster than NAND
shaw - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I could see SATA II could remove the bottleneck, but still, 4GB of data? Gigabyte is smarter then this.. it's just not going to fly. Though, it is a pretty good start.The next logical steps is probably finding a way to get a standard harddrive to use something like this as a memory buffer (7200rpm with DDR200 1GB of cache) and then maybe it would actaully be worth it.
JNo - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I was disappointed that nothing was mentioned of the practicalities of moving windows or a game onto this thing. Is there any software that would transfer whatever data is on this thing (including functioning operating systems) to a normal drive at regular intervals? And keep them functioning? If not, what's the point?! Each time you have to install windows/a game to this thing (after powerfailures or just for the sake of having something different on it), you have to install all the updates/personal tweaks/mods/saved games/configurations etc which would takes SO MUCH MORE TIME than the extra few seconds you save from faster boot/game load times... why anandtech does not take these things into consideration?! To paraphrase another poster: WHOOPEE-F*CKING-DOaraczynski - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
disappointing gaming benefits, too small a size, they should've used a custom controller rather then the connect-the-dots one.i'll be waiting to see what version 3 brings.
EODetroit - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
The $150 thing is a killer. But if they can only pump out 1000 of them, it makes business sense to have the price high. This just like AMD having high X2 prices because they can't possibly make enough quantity to fill orders if the price was lower... same exact thing.$90 per 1GB stick of ram is high, I'm sure people can shop around and find it cheaper.
As for RAIDing two of these, Anand said he only actually had one of them, but was trying to get a second. So maybe more on that later. I think that even if Raid 0 doesn't work for some reason, JBOD would work.
I'm curious what the bottleneck in computers now-a-days really is. I think Anand should get an NForce Pro with 8 GB of ram running 64bit XP, set up the largest RAM DISK (real software-type RAM disk) you can, and see how that affects performance. If performance shows the same mediocre gains that this device showed, then that means a new SATA2 version wouldn't improve things either. If that test showed there were large gains out there to be had, then yeah there's a future here. I would do it myself but I don't have access to that hardware hehe.