Anyone know when the IDE ram cards are coming?

[HDTVMan]

At the last event. I think it was E3 someone was releasing a card that connects to the IDE cable that acts as a hard drive even though its populated with memory you supply. Supposed to act as a swapfile drive. Because obviously ram is faster than a hard drive.

Anyone know a release date for them? They were supposed to be cheap something like 30-50.00.

 

[imported_whatever]

What it was was a PCI card that has DDR slots. I don't know the release date though.

 

[Viditor]

I believe it was for the Xmas season...

 

[TGS]

Gigabyte i-RAM, uses DDR1 memory and connects via a SATA interface to show up as a hard disk drive.

It's search-fu as well.

*Gongs heard in background*

 

[HDTVMan]

Originally posted by: Viditor
I believe it was for the Xmas season...

Cant wait that long. I want it now! (Veruca) Willy Wonka Style Now.

 

[EODetroit]

No, it was supposed to be available in July. That's really soon now (tm), if you check your calendar.

Edit: I did some more research and the more recent web articles state "early August". So the date has slipped, but also gotten more specific, which is good overall. And yeah, I'm gunna get two of em .

 

[HDTVMan]

Originally posted by: EODetroit
No, it was supposed to be available in July. That's really soon now (tm), if you check your calendar.

Edit: I did some more research and the more recent web articles state "early August". So the date has slipped, but also gotten more specific, which is good overall. And yeah, I'm gunna get two of em .

One for each machine or 2 in one system? If your putting 2 in one system what is it you plan on doing?

 

[EODetroit]

Yeah 2 in one system 'cause I need to store about 4.5 GB of data on it, which is too much for just 1 device (barring cheap 2GB modules).

I plan on doing Raid 0 or JBOD, either way should be fine, whatever works best.

 

[imported_whatever]

Originally posted by: HDTVMan

Originally posted by: EODetroit
No, it was supposed to be available in July. That's really soon now (tm), if you check your calendar.

Edit: I did some more research and the more recent web articles state "early August". So the date has slipped, but also gotten more specific, which is good overall. And yeah, I'm gunna get two of em .

One for each machine or 2 in one system? If your putting 2 in one system what is it you plan on doing?

just to tell people, two in one system would NOT increase the access speed, the PCI bus is what will limit it (and PCI bandwidth is shared among all the slots)

 

[coomar]

what if they put out a pci-e version?

 

[Scitex]

From what I understand, the PCI only supplies the voltage to charge the RAM and recharge the battery....the speed is limited by the SATA interface.

 

[TankGuys]

I believe they are slated to hit in early August. I'll keep checking with the distributors and keep you posted though.

 

[Gerbil333]

Cool...so you could put 2GBs of RAM there and use it as a page file, right?

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

I think they are limited to 4 1gig dimms. 2gig dimms won't work.

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

For version 1 anyway. I am sure there will be a PCI-ex/SATA II version that allows for 2 and 4gig dimms and then DDR2 and then DDR3 and ...

 

[Dadofamunky]

Mmmm.... yummy goodness.... finally, a way to put those empty PCI slots to some use, and stop the disk thrashing from the page file.

 

[sonoran]

Originally posted by: Gerbil333
Cool...so you could put 2GBs of RAM there and use it as a page file, right?

In this case wouldn't it be better to just max out the system RAM and skip "swapping to disk" in the first place? After all, swapping to the pagefile should only occur if the system RAM is all in use and the system still needs to use more "memory".

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Originally posted by: sonoran

Originally posted by: Gerbil333
Cool...so you could put 2GBs of RAM there and use it as a page file, right?

In this case wouldn't it be better to just max out the system RAM and skip "swapping to disk" in the first place? After all, swapping to the pagefile should only occur if the system RAM is all in use and the system still needs to use more "memory".

There are some programs that don't care how much memory you have and still use the paging file. I will use it for Windows, Office, and the paging file and simply ghost it every night. I do Folding@home so my computer is on all the time anyway. If something should happen I have the ghost backup to reinstall.

 

[EODetroit]

If you believe this: http://www.overclockers.com/tips00788/index02.asp

It says there's no technical reason for a 4GB limit. I interpret that as meaning the "4GB limit" is a practical one since its not practical to purchase 2GB sticks just so you can run 8GB on one card, when its more cost effective to just buy two cards. But who really knows at this point?

And I wish people would actually read and understand that this is a SATA device, it doesn't communicate over PCI. If anything, that's the biggest marketting challenge Gigabyte is going to face, people will think it sucks because of the PCI factor, when in fact its only using the PCI slots for power.

 

[HDTVMan]

4 gig is a 32bit limitation. With the newer processors they can map out memory way beyond. Lets hope the board allows you to exceed 4 gig as well since your swapfile is usually set larger than your system ram.

Sure were at the mercy of the ATA interface but maybe someone will implement this somehow on the motherboard giving it an extra boost by accessing the ram at full speed. But consider this compared to hard drive performance.

Most of us will see significant improvements just because a lot of us dont use seperate hard drives for the swap file. I use a seperate partition just to avoid fragmentation of my OS and Swapfile. But Putting the swapfile on a seperate hard drive from the one your using makes a big difference. Now exclude it from the hard drive entirely and this will be really impressive. If only windows would avoid using a swapfile if you have the ram? For this I think the windows developers should be kicked in the kneecaps.

 

[cheesehead]

How much RAM would you need to have on one of these to make a difference? 2GB of RAM is not cheap to buy.

 

[Viditor]

Originally posted by: Cheesehead
How much RAM would you need to have on one of these to make a difference? 2GB of RAM is not cheap to buy.

It's probably less expensive than you think...
$67 for 1GB sticks of PC2100, which gives you a 4GB HDD (made of ram) for ~$325.
Since it acts like any other SATA drive, you can buy 2 and stripe an array.
So for $650, you have an almost instantaneous 8GB boot drive.
You have to believe that just the speeding up of the swap file will add an EXTRAORDINARY speed bump to any system...

 

[EODetroit]

Originally posted by: HDTVMan
4 gig is a 32bit limitation. With the newer processors they can map out memory way beyond. Lets hope the board allows you to exceed 4 gig as well since your swapfile is usually set larger than your system ram.

I don't remember a 4 GB hard drive size limitation since way way back in the day (and I thought it was at 2GB). Since this is a SATA device, I don't think there's any such sort of 32 bit limitation.

Or were you thinking of the 4GB 32bit limitation of system ram in today's computers? That analogy, as far as I know, doesn't apply here. Remember, as far as your computer knows, this is a (rather small but fast) hard drive device with a SATA connection. And we have it on good authority that there's no "technical" 4GB limitation from the iRAM device itself (assuming you can trust that the web site I linked above isn't making stuff up).

Again, I'd guess that the only reason they mentioned a 4GB size to the thing is because it has 4 slots and they haven't tested it with many 2GB modules yet, since those modules are rare and impractical compared to bonding/raiding two devices together.

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Originally posted by: EODetroit
If you believe this: http://www.overclockers.com/tips00788/index02.asp

It says there's no technical reason for a 4GB limit. I interpret that as meaning the "4GB limit" is a practical one since its not practical to purchase 2GB sticks just so you can run 8GB on one card, when its more cost effective to just buy two cards. But who really knows at this point?

And I wish people would actually read and understand that this is a SATA device, it doesn't communicate over PCI. If anything, that's the biggest marketting challenge Gigabyte is going to face, people will think it sucks because of the PCI factor, when in fact its only using the PCI slots for power.

Technical reason no but I thought Gigabyte stated four 1gig dimms maximum.

 

[HDTVMan]

You wouldnt need the fastest ram since the bottleneck is the ATA interface. So you could get away with using cheaper slower ram. Still faster than the hard drive.