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 as a boot drive
Since the i-RAM appears as a normal hard drive, you can install Windows on it just like you would a regular hard drive with no extra drivers (assuming that none are needed for your SATA controller).A full install of Windows XP Pro can easily fit on a 4GB i-RAM and even on a 2GB i-RAM, but you have to be careful not to install applications into the C:\Program Files directory and disable System Restore for the i-RAM drive among other precautions. Why would you ever want to install your OS on an i-RAM card? We came up with two possibilities:
First off, loading your OS on the i-RAM will reduce boot times.
| Boot Time Comparison | |||||
Windows Boot Time (Lower is Better) |
|||||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 9.12s |
||||
| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 14.06s |
||||
With a Western Digital Raptor, you can go from the boot menu to the Windows desktop in 14.06 seconds; with the i-RAM, it takes 9.12 seconds. It's not instantaneous, but it's definitely quicker and noticeable.
Our thoughts are that with further optimization, the boot process can be better tuned for very low latency storage devices such as the i-RAM, but that won't happen with any currently shipping version of Windows.
The second reason for installing your OS on an i-RAM card is a bit more specific, but one we came up with when thinking about a secondary benefit of Gigabyte's i-RAM: it's silent.
You could theoretically build a home theater computer using just the i-RAM to hold your OS and map a network drive (hopefully kept in another room) to hold all of your media (e.g. music, movies, pictures, etc.). Paired with a silent PSU and a very quiet running CPU fan (maybe even on a Pentium M based system), you can have a truly silent HTPC, thanks to the i-RAM. You'd ideally want whatever database of your media collection to be stored on the network drive and not your OS, just in case something ever happened causing your i-RAM to lose its data, but it is a viable use for Gigabyte's i-RAM.
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simpletech - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I think another possible use (besides certain kinds of servers, like mail servers), is for video capture. The size is a bit small, but if you were capturing segments of footage, it might work. And the price could be reasonable.BikeDude - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
"but 32-bit Windows can't use more than 4GB of RAM, including the swap file size."First of all... "Swap file" is a misnomer. We talked about "swap file" back in the Windows 3.1 days when the OS would swap a process' entire memory space to the *swap* file.
These days the OS will read/write selected pages of a process' memory from/to the cache manager (who may or may not elect to use the disk to get to the physical pagefile). *Paging*, not "swapping". Executables and libraries are memory mapped and thus start their lives with all pages firmly on disk (so a big executable won't necessarily load slow, but many small DLLs OTOH just might).
I don't have Windows XP in front of me, but my 32-bit Windows 2003 Standard ed. with 4GB memory and 1GB pagefile certainly doesn't seem affected by the limitation you mention. Enterprise edition can address even more physical memory... Each process is still limited to a 2GB virtual address space though. (32-bit processes marked capable of such will gain a 4GB virtual address space under 64-bit Windows)
I realise that XPSP2, despite PAE, is limited to 4GB physical memory (http://blogs.msdn.com/carmencr/archive/2004/08/06/...">http://blogs.msdn.com/carmencr/archive/2004/08/06/..., but pagefile as well? Nah, sounds iffy.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Without PAE (or something similar), 32-bit OSes are indeed limited to 4GB of RAM. This is what is being referred to, as PAE is limited to Intel and I don't believe it's available on non-Server versions of Windows. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but PAE is pretty much only on Xeons, right?)You're right that it's paging instead of swapping now, but there's really not much difference between the two. Basically, you put data onto the HDD in order to free up physical RAM, on the assumption that the least recently used data that was moved to the HDD won't be accessed again for a while.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Anyway, I've modified the comment to reflect the original intent. If you're running PAE and Server, it's a whole different ball game for high memory systems.Penth - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Wow, my friend and I talked about the possibilities for these things several times. But at 3x the initial price and not the performance increase I would have expected, the techie in me is disappointed. My wallet is happy though.StanleyBuchanan - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I wonder what the issue is with RAID that Anand comments on.... seems odd that it would behave differently than a HD in this respect and cause problems...I would love to have 12gb or more... which is enough for Windows XP, a productivity suite, and a modern game... anything more could be run from NAS
Zan Lynx - Sunday, July 31, 2005 - link
Probably something to do with the PCI bus power. Perhaps two of these cards take more juice than the bus expects to provide while on standby.phaxmohdem - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I saw someone else posting as well, but I would very much like to see some database performance numbers from this device, as well as perhaps a web-serving benchmark.xTYBALTx - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
How some FPS benchies?GTMan - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I laughed when I saw that line :) A very interesting device and I look forward to where this goes in the future. Your "Final Words" could use a bit of brevity.