Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 3:50 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
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) |
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| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 25.25s |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 77.689s |
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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 |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 26.304s |
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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) |
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| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 31.719s |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 95.953s |
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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 |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 70s |
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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 |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 19s |
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Aganack1 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
i thought they said that they were only going to make 1000. enought for the crazies who have money to burn...P.S. if any of you crazies are reading this i could burn some of that money for you... just let me know.
Houdani - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Thanks for running through the multiple roles for which the iRam might be useful. I'm rather surprised it wasn't MORE useful in the benches. I'd be interested in learning (i.e. slacking back and reading the results of someone else's research) why the i-Ram is still as large a bottleneck as it is. Yes it's faster than the HD, but why isn't it much, much faster? Are we seeing OS inefficiency or something else altogether?In the end, though, it doesn't fit my needs particularly well, so I'll pass this round. Maybe a future version will be more appealing in terms of cost, speed, size.
Sunbird - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
maybe the SATA interface isn't fast enough?pio!pio! - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I'm constantly shuffling 1--3 gb mpeg2 files around...this would be greatGed - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Would it be possible for an NVIDIA or ATI graphics card that used TurboCache or HyperMemory to make use of the i-RAM?That might be interesting.
Anton74 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
No, absolutely not. Even if it were, the SATA interface is *way* too slow to be of use for something like that.And even if that were not a factor, why spend that kind of money on the i-RAM where the same amount would buy a *much* superior video card with its own dedicated memory?
Anton
kleinwl - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I think that this would be very helpful as a page file for workstations. Older workstations may be maxed out with 4GB and windows 2000 (which the company does not want to move over to xp-64) and still need additional ram for CAD/CFD/etc. This would be an easy upgrade with a reasonable amount of performance increase.sandorski - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Was hoping it would offer more, especially as a Pagefile. Any plans to make a PCI-e version(IIRC PCI-e has a ton more bandwidth than SATA), that would likely make this a Must-have. As it stands now I'd only use it for the silence in a HT Setup.Gatak - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Using PCI/PCI-e for transfers would require OS drivers which wouldn't be available for all OSes.sprockkets - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Keep in mind that for many years the ide/sata controllers are NOT on the PCI bus of the southbridge, so PCI is not a limitation.