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 for Applications
Gamers aren't the only ones plagued by long load times. There are a handful of applications that do take a reasonable amount of time to load that could be benefitted by being installed on an i-RAM card.We tried a wide variety of applications, everything from Office to Photoshop and 3ds max. What we found was the following: for the most part, the majority of applications are as fast as they are going to get on any current-generation SATA drive. We noticed no performance difference loading any of the MS Office applications on a Raptor or on the i-RAM card.
| Application Load Time Comparison (Lower is Better) | |||||
Adobe Photoshop CS |
Microsoft Outlook 2003 |
Microsoft Excel 2003 |
|||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 3.537s |
2.51s |
1.654s |
||
| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 6.037s |
2.562s |
1.765s |
||
The biggest differences that we saw were obviously with applications that took a long time to load to begin with, one of the most popular culprits being Adobe Photoshop CS (we didn't have CS2 available at the time of testing).
On a WD Raptor, Photoshop CS took about 6 seconds to load; it's not much when you time it, but it can feel like an eternity when you're actually sitting there waiting for it. The i-RAM cut the load time down to 3.537 seconds, a significant reduction, and very noticeable.
The major issue with the i-RAM and using it to install our applications on it, once again, becomes size. But it is entirely possible to keep a handful of your very frequently used applications on the card, giving you faster access to them.
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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.