Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage

i-RAM as a Paging Drive

One question that we've seen a lot is whether or not the i-RAM can be used to store your pagefile. Since the i-RAM behaves just like a regular hard drive, Windows has no problem using it to store your pagefile, so the "can you" part of that question is easily answered. The real question happens to be, "should you?"

We have heard arguments on both sides of the fence; some say that Windows inefficiently handles memory and inevitably pages to disk even when you have memory to spare, while others say that you'd be stupid to put your pagefile on an i-RAM rather than just add more memory to your system. So, which is it?

Unfortunately, this is the type of thing that's difficult to benchmark, but it is the type of thing that's pretty easy to explain if you just sit down and use the product. We set up a machine, very similar to how we would a personal system, but tended to focus on memory hogs - web pages with lots of Flash, Photoshop, etc. Of course, we opened them all up at once, switched between the applications, used them independently, simultaneously, basically whatever we could do to stress the system as it normally would be stressed.

At the same time, we monitored a number of things going on - mainly the size of the pagefile, the amount of system memory used, the frequency of disk accesses, pagefile usage per process... basically everything we could get our hands on through perfmon to give us an idea if Windows was swapping to disk or not.

The end result? There was no real tangible performance difference between putting more memory in the system and using the hard disk for the pagefile or putting less memory in the system and using the i-RAM for the pagefile. Granted, if we had a way of measuring the overall performance, it would have shown that we would be much better off with more memory in the system (it runs faster, and it is accessed much quicker than off the i-RAM).

The only benefit that we found to using the i-RAM to store our pagefile was if you happened to have a couple GBs of older DDR200 memory lying around; that memory would be useless as your main system memory in a modern machine, but it'd make a lot better of a pagefile than a mechanical hard disk.

One more situation we encountered that would benefit from storing your pagefile on the i-RAM was those seemingly random times when Windows swaps to disk for no reason. But for the most part, our system was slower when we had less memory and stored the swapfile in it than when we had more memory and less swap file.

Adobe Photoshop is a slightly different creature as it keeps a scratch disk that is separate from the Windows pagefile. We tested Photoshop and used the i-RAM as our scratch disk, but in all cases it always made more sense to just throw more memory at Photoshop to improve performance where we ran out of memory. If the operations you're performing in Photoshop can fit into system memory, then you'll never touch the scratch disk.

Overall, based on our testing, the i-RAM doesn't make much sense as a paging drive unless you have the spare memory. The problem with "spare" DDR200 memory is that it is most likely in small 64MB, 128MB or maybe 256MB sizes, which doesn't buy you much space on an i-RAM drive. For most people, you're much better off just tossing more memory in your system.