Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 3:50 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Overall Performance
How does the i-RAM impact overall system performance? In order to find out, we installed Winstone on the drive and compared its benchmark results to the Raptor:| Overall Performance Comparison (Higher is Better) | |||||
Business Winstone 2004 |
Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 |
||||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 24.5 |
36.3 |
|||
| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 23.9 |
35.4 |
|||
What's very interesting here is that there's very little performance gain from running Winstone on the i-RAM, which tells us that Winstone isn't nearly as disk bound as we originally thought.
We wanted to run other benchmark suites on the i-RAM; however, we ran into capacity issues once again.
One of the biggest advantages of the i-RAM is its random access performance, which comes into play particularly in multitasking scenarios where there are a lot of disk accesses. In order to see if this translates into any tangible real world performance gains, we turned to the Multitasking Business Winstone tests:
"This test uses the same applications as the Business Winstone test, but runs some of them in the background. The test has three segments: in the first, files copy in the background while the script runs Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer in the foreground. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the second segment. In that segment, Excel and Word operations run in the foreground while WinZip archives in the background. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the third segment. In that segment, Norton AntiVirus runs a virus check in the background while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft FrontPage, and WinZip operations run in the foreground."
| Winstone Multitasking Performance Comparison (Higher is Better) | |||||
Test 1 |
Test 2 |
Test 3 |
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| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 5.55 |
2.98 |
3.1 |
||
| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 2.78 |
2.93 |
3.04 |
||
The biggest performance gain is in the first multitasking test, which is the file copy test while Outlook and IE run. The performance advantage here is tremendous, with the i-RAM generating a score almost twice that of the Raptor.
The rest of the tests show very little performance improvement. We'd guess that the majority of the boost in the first test is due to the file copy that takes place during the run.
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pieq3dot14 - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I'd like to see how this would change the overall latency of a system. I have a pretty nice home studio, and I can see using this as a boot drive, and then recording off to a raid array. With all the random accesses coming from the solid state drive, and only sequencial going to the raid, I'd think the latencies would drop significantly. Could be pretty handy, even extending the life of older systems.bwall04 - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Anand, first of all great review, it's nice to see some numbers on this.Would it be possible to bench a few tests again with 2GB of system memory? I can vouch that 2GB makes a noticeable difference when loading any game. I realize that you were going for an "enthusiast" level machine but games like HL2, Doom3,and Battlefield 2 has started a push with the high end to upgrade to either 2x1GB or 4x512MB.
racolvin - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Could they perhaps have gone with a full-size card and then oriented the DIMM slots perpendicular to the mobo? I had something like that ages ago in an Amiga that worked well from a size perspective. It might get them to 8Gb :)somu - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
cost of this unit was increased 3 times.then it went from sata2 to sata.
Real life performance is not as gd as i expected, when i first heard i was excited to see them working on removing the bottleneck but going from 13 second load time to 10 second doesnt warrant the cost of the 150 card and 4 gb ram.
shaw - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
#1 4GB space = poop#2 Still bottlenecked by the SATA bus
I just hope this is the beginning of a bright future, but for now I'm not impressed one bit.
IvanAndreevich - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
How about a Raid0 test with 2 of these cards :)JNo - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
How about Read the Frickin Article?audiophi1e - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I think the more useful implementation is to have the RAM pre-installed onto the drive. And I'm not talking RAM sticks. I'm talking about these guys at Gigabyte contacting Samsung, Micron, or Crucial to directly supply the chips and directly solder them onto 5.25" plates. I think in the space of a 5.25" bay, you can fit 2 of these said plates. It won't be hard to think that they'd be able to fit 15GB of RAM in a 5.25" drive's space.Then with the remaining space, mount a MUCH larger battery. Have the battery be able to last DAYS, not hours. This will set people a little more at ease. It will sure make me feel better. (and no, this 5.25" ramdrive will not be using a molex connector. Simply put in a dummy PCI card to allow the 5.25" to draw power from it)
The fatal flaw in their product design is that most people simply won't have that many RAM sticks laying around to make this thing useful. Why not supply the RAM, and in the process increase the possible size from 4GB, to something much more useful. If we already know that only 'power users' with little budget restraints will buy this, then just supply it the way we know they want it: Big.
Zebo - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Yeah one really needs about 15-20G to make this a livable reality. And that would cost about 3K and about 4K if they did it right i.e. ultra SCSI or even PCIe interface.Sindar - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
If they got real serrious tunned it up with on pcb ddr3. Made it something like a ZIF socket thing. Gave it a direct bus to the chip, changed the memorie contoler to let it throtle wide open. Wrote drivers, OSes to just use it. It might be like a really fast bios set up for the OS. At first it could be like an extra, but as costs came down maybe it would be intergrated into the motherboard. Humm nearly alomst instant boot up...it's a dream, even if it's only mine!