*FINALLY*

[ShadowBlade]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Acanthus
*FINALLY*

Yes, the Gigabyte card with onboard battery and lower price seems to be a better solution than the (been around so long), Rocket Drive.
DDR vs PC-133 for these type "drives" don't make much difference at all when compared to slow mechanical HDs.

where can i get one of those!!!
does newegg sell them?

 

[Brian23]

Originally posted by: ShadowBlade

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Acanthus
*FINALLY*

Yes, the Gigabyte card with onboard battery and lower price seems to be a better solution than the (been around so long), Rocket Drive.
DDR vs PC-133 for these type "drives" don't make much difference at all when compared to slow mechanical HDs.

where can i get one of those!!!
does newegg sell them?

You don't want the rocket drive. It uses PCI to transfer data from the memory. All those bites flying around will clog up your data tube. Very shortly Gigabyte's solution will be available and it uses SATA to transfer the data. I presume most recent chipsets have the SATA controllers seprate from the PCI bus meaning that you can actually use all the available bandwidth.

 

[bluemax]

[sigh] Why do these kids keep wanting to install a game on this? :roll:
It won't improve gaming performance much - that's not what this is designed for.

 

[shabby]

Ramdisks have been out for a long time, now someone puts a battery on it and all of a sudden everyone goes crazy... what gives.

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: shabby
Ramdisks have been out for a long time, now someone puts a battery on it and all of a sudden everyone goes crazy... what gives.

1. It's MSRP is $50.
2. RAM is dirt cheap right now.
3. It uses SATA to interface with the OS, so your system sees it is a hot-swappable hard disk.

 

[imported_Tick]

Originally posted by: phisrow
Sure, having a magic nonvolatile ramdrive would be rather nice; but it isn't as though dding/ghosting over your ramdrive to your hardrive before shutting down for an extended period would be all that difficult. I imagine that your wallet would hurt more than your patience for pretty much anything over 4gigs, so it wouldn't be much of a burden.

It's called sram or flash....

 

[imported_Tick]

Anyway, this is just the poor mans SSD...

Any, single layers extremely fast flash would smoke this thing.

 

[Auric]

Originally posted by: bluemax
[sigh] Why do these kids keep wanting to install a game on this? :roll:
It won't improve gaming performance much - that's not what this is designed for.

Given sufficient system RAM it shouldn't affect actual play performance at all, except in loading betwixt levels 'n' such. Though I wouldn't be surprised if it eliminated the occasional hiccup either. Last one in the game is a rotten egg!

I wonder if the usual proggies will be able to image to and fro' the RAM drive and HDD's (and discs)? Sounds like it.

 

[biostud]

They should stick it on a PCIe x4 card.

 

[LoganBu]

Originally posted by: biostud
They should stick it on a PCIe x4 card.

:thumbsup:

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Tostada
I think this is a good idea simply because Windows is still too stupid to function correctly if I turn off the swapfile.

It's sad, really.

I feel your pain

If you're using enough RAM that you are ever hitting the swapfile, turning it off would be a Very Bad Idea. If you're not using enough RAM to hit the swapfile, modification of the swapfile settings should have no impact whatsoever on performance (other than that you might *slightly* reduce OS overhead by turning it off, depending on how stupidly it is implemented). While it is annoying that you cannot truly disable the swapfile in Windows, this has essentially zero impact on any real-world performance situation.

At $50 it would be a very attractive product for a lot of servers or high-end workstations, especially if it can take 4x1GB of RAM.

Even if you have 4GB of mem and the swapfile never gets hit, disabling it makes it run like absolute trash (win2k pro).

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Tick

Originally posted by: phisrow
Sure, having a magic nonvolatile ramdrive would be rather nice; but it isn't as though dding/ghosting over your ramdrive to your hardrive before shutting down for an extended period would be all that difficult. I imagine that your wallet would hurt more than your patience for pretty much anything over 4gigs, so it wouldn't be much of a burden.

It's called sram or flash....

Sram is way too expensive, flash is way too slow.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: biostud
They should stick it on a PCIe x4 card.

They dont need to, all the slot does is power the card and they want maximum compatibility. Im sure if this card is successful a PCI-E variant will be along as well when its more mainstream and PCI slots are no longer offered.

 

[Pariah]

Looks like a pretty dumb product to me marketed to the wrong people. It's ATA RAID all over again. A castrated hack job that will be eaten up by the buzzword obssessed despite being practically useless to a home user in all but rare instances. You can't install enough RAM on the card to make it of any use except in limited situations. You're better off just installing 2GB of RAM in your system. People already complain that a 15k 36GB SCSI drive for around $200 is too small and expensive. Yet this is some panacea? At least I can install Windows on it. 2GB? Forget it. I run a 5 GB boot drive with nothing on it but Windows, shared program data, and whatever else gets tossed into the user directories by programs, with no applications, games, swap file or temporary internet files and the drive is still 4GB full. So even if you doubled the capacity to 4GB running the cost into the $500 range, it still wouldn't be usable as a boot drive. Bumping up to 8GB would be about the minimum usable capacity for a drive and suddenly you're blowing by $1500 which is certainly not worth it. And DIMMs that large are almost always registered DIMMS which probably aren't compatible with this card. The volatility stinks too. 16 hours is a joke.

There is very fast flash memory out their for applications like this, but it is far from mainstream at this point.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Looks like a pretty dumb product to me marketed to the wrong people. It's ATA RAID all over again. A castrated hack job that will be eaten up by the buzzword obssessed despite being practically useless to a home user in all but rare instances. You can't install enough RAM on the card to make it of any use except in limited situations. You're better off just installing 2GB of RAM in your system. People already complain that a 15k 36GB SCSI drive for around $200 is too small and expensive. Yet this is some panacea? At least I can install Windows on it. 2GB? Forget it. I run a 5 GB boot drive with nothing on it but Windows, shared program data, and whatever else gets tossed into the user directories by programs, with no applications, games, swap file or temporary internet files and the drive is still 4GB full. So even if you doubled the capacity to 4GB running the cost into the $500 range, it still wouldn't be usable as a boot drive. Bumping up to 8GB would be about the minimum usable capacity for a drive and suddenly you're blowing by $1500 which is certainly not worth it. And DIMMs that large are almost always registered DIMMS which probably aren't compatible with this card. The volatility stinks too. 16 hours is a joke.

There is very fast flash memory out their for applications like this, but it is far from mainstream at this point.

It isnt even ES yet, and its still far slower than this solution in transfer rates (samsungs new flash claims 60MB/sec. DDR200 is 2100MB/sec).

You obviously cant install windows to this drive without spending an obscene amount of money, but thats not what id use it for anyway.

Edit: Spelling

 

[H20Cool]

[sigh] Why do these kids keep wanting to install a game on this?

I hear ya . A typical game's load time is not simply limited by your hard drive. Most of what is loaded when you're waiting for the next level are compressed textures, maps, scenes, etc. that all have to be decompressed by your CPU. So really, game loading time is better reduced through a more powerfull CPU, not nessesarily a faster hard drive.

Maximum PC had an article a few months back comparing typical game load times with a RAID0 setup vs. a single drive, there was no real world difference, which brings me to the assumption that someone made above about two Raptors in RAID0 being twice as fast as a single drive. That's simply, not true. Even maximum burst transfer rates don't double with RAID0 due to overhead, etc, not to mention that burst transfer rates mean nothing in the real world. What is important are average sustained transfer rates and seek times.

This new i-Ram card will get you seek times in the nanosecond range vs. milliseconds with a HD, that's several magnitudes faster. Also, being solid state DDR, you should be able to saturate the SATA bus at 150 MB per second SUSTAINED transfer rates and if you have a mobo that supports SATAII, then you should be hopping along at 300MB/sec. This coupled with ns seek times will get you a hard drive that's anywhere from 3 to 6 times faster in real world performance than a WD raptor and as a bonus, fragmentation wouldn't be an issue. That would be amazing, simply put.

Why all the negative comments about the 16 hour battery? It's actually been proven that cycling on and off will wear out electrical components faster than leaving them on constantly. 16 hours is plently. I don't even have a UPS, yet I can't remember my computer being down for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time due to the odd power outage that might happen a few times a year. So this is a non-issue. 16 hours is plently of down time. Not only that, like someone mentioned earlier, you could easily back-up 1 to 4 GB of data on a DVD or one of your HDDs in a few minutes if you were planning on being away from the computer for an extended period of time.

As far as I'm concerned, this product is meant to have an OS installed on it. I would imagine that one of these devices with 2 or 4 GB with Windows XP installed on it would speed up real world system performance considerably, not to mention quieting down your system due to the lack of HD head movement. Booting would be way faster and quieter too.

Overall, I think if this product turns out to perform as well as it's spec'd out to be, then it's a great product. Personally, I think the future of OS's should be solid state. Remember the Commodore 64 ? Turn it on, and bang, you're ready to roll, no waiting 45 seconds to load the OS. Why can't it be this way now? I'd like to see it built into motherboards eventually. I think Gigabyte has taken the right approach by using DDR with a battery as opposed to sram or flash due to their disadvantages in speed and price, not to mention that non-volatile ram can only be written to a certain number of times (similar to a rewritable DVD/CD) whereas volatile RAM like DDR can be written to an unlimited number of times.

I will be purchasing one of these when they come out and as soon as I get some benchmarks I'll let you all know.

 

[biostud]

Originally posted by: H20Cool

[sigh] Why do these kids keep wanting to install a game on this?

Why all the negative comments about the 16 hour battery? It's actually been proven that cycling on and off will wear out electrical components faster than leaving them on constantly. 16 hours is plently.

While this card of course isn't for the everyday user, the problem would be for those of us who like to turn off our computers when we don't use them. It saves money on the electrical bill.

 

[H20Cool]

At least I can install Windows on it. 2GB? Forget it. I run a 5 GB boot drive with nothing on it but Windows, shared program data, and whatever else gets tossed into the user directories by programs, with no applications, games, swap file or temporary internet files and the drive is still 4GB full.

Well, you must be running XP in it's standard bloated form. I use my own slipstreamed version of XP with a load of the features tossed. Most people don't use half the crap that windows XP installs by default. Do yourself a favour and unbloat your OS by slip streaming it. Get rid of all the crap you don't need, turn off services you don't use. Get rid of the MS games, accessabilty options, etc. Not only will Windows run way faster, but you'll easily get a fully working installed Windows XP pro running with under 2GB of storage. Just make sure that any games or apps you install gets installed on another drive and just leave the raw OS on it's own 2GB RAM drive.

 

[H20Cool]

While this card of course isn't for the everyday user, the problem would be for those of us who like to turn off our computers when we don't use them. It saves money on the electrical bill.

Lets see, a pc in standby mode will consume an absolute maximum of about 50 watts, and that's being conservative (it's probably less). Power consumption * time in hours = watt-hours.

50w x 24hrs. = 1200 watt-hours or 1.2 kW-h.
1.2 kW-h * 30 days = 36 kW-h.

I'm not sure where you live, but I pay approx. $0.08 per kW-h, so I'll be conservative again and say you pay around $0.10 per kW-h.
$0.10 * 36 kW-h = $3.60

Realistically, you are using your PC for several hours a month, so really actual standby time would be less the 30 days @ 24 hrs a day. So it turns out to be around three bucks a month to run your computer in standby vs. just turning it off.

I was going to mention the power consumption aspect, but I thought, no way Nobody would be concerned about an extra few bucks a month on their electrical bill? Apparently, I was wrong. Your computer and monitor combined uses very little power when in standby mode. Leaving your oven on, or turning the heat up a few notches will kill more power in a day than your computer would consume in a month while in standby. Jeesh

You're right, this card definitely isn't for people wanting to save an extra $3.00 a month on their electrical bill.

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Pariah
Looks like a pretty dumb product to me marketed to the wrong people. It's ATA RAID all over again. A castrated hack job that will be eaten up by the buzzword obssessed despite being practically useless to a home user in all but rare instances. You can't install enough RAM on the card to make it of any use except in limited situations. You're better off just installing 2GB of RAM in your system. People already complain that a 15k 36GB SCSI drive for around $200 is too small and expensive. Yet this is some panacea? At least I can install Windows on it. 2GB? Forget it. I run a 5 GB boot drive with nothing on it but Windows, shared program data, and whatever else gets tossed into the user directories by programs, with no applications, games, swap file or temporary internet files and the drive is still 4GB full. So even if you doubled the capacity to 4GB running the cost into the $500 range, it still wouldn't be usable as a boot drive. Bumping up to 8GB would be about the minimum usable capacity for a drive and suddenly you're blowing by $1500 which is certainly not worth it. And DIMMs that large are almost always registered DIMMS which probably aren't compatible with this card. The volatility stinks too. 16 hours is a joke.

There is very fast flash memory out their for applications like this, but it is far from mainstream at this point.

It isnt even ES yet, and its still far slower than this solution in transfer rates (samsungs new flash claims 60MB/sec. DDR200 is 2100MB/sec).

You obviously cant install windows to this drive without spending an obscene amount of money, but thats not what id use it for anyway.

Edit: Spelling

Flash can hit about 70MB/s which due to the practically 0 access time it has makes it a true 70MB/s under all circumstances. That's very fast under normal usage patterns. It is rare that a user will be streaming enough data for that to be a hinderance to performance. If a user does require sustained transfers much faster than that for long periods, then they aren't using a 2GB drive.

Putting an OS on an SSD drive is the application that would give the user by far the largest speed boost. The random, frequent and small reads the OS makes is ideal for such a drive. If it can't be used for that, it's worthless to more than 99% of users. What are you going to use it for? One game? What's the point of that? Ignoring how little difference a drive like this would make in gaming if you have 1GB or more of RAM. With 2GB's, it would be difficult to even get 2 games on that. Where's the speed boost if every time I want to use the drive, I have to uninstall the game that is on there to make space for a new one and then install the new one?

This drive does have some useful applications, but just like RAID, basically none of them are applicable to any of us. I eagerly await all the responses from the basement enterprise dB programmers and Time/Life photoshop editors using their pirated copies of Paintshop Pro about how much this wll benefit them.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
Even if you have 4GB of mem and the swapfile never gets hit, disabling it makes it run like absolute trash (win2k pro).

So leave it turned on. Annoying, but hardly fatal. If you're not hitting it, it will just sit there and do nothing. :roll:

 

[dullard]

I've been a user of programs that turn your RAM into a drive ever since I got my first computer ~19 years ago. I had a whopping 640 kB of memory (after an upgrade from 256 kB) and many games required just 256 kB. Thus I had a massive amount of spare memory. What did I do? Create a drive out of the spare memory. Suddenly saving a Sierra game took a few seconds instead of 5 minutes. It was the most dramatic speed gain I've ever seen with one simple step. A noticible ~100 times faster performance when I needed it most.

That is still the potential of RAM drives today. A very dramatic and very noticible improvement for temporary storage.

Sure there was the drawback of the Tandy 1000 crashing and I lost my data. So once an hour or so, I'd manually save it to disk. But technology is better than that now. We can automatically save the data from the RAM drive to a hard drive when the RAM drive is idle. Thus fast performance, and little to no risk of data loss.

Does everyone need this? No. Hard drives are plenty fast for the vast majority of users (contrary to what many Anandtech posters claim). But there are some of us who need fast temporary storage. The disk size isn't a restriction. I still use a 4 GB SCSI drive that holds the OS, all my programs, and most of my data on one work computer. A 2 GB RAM drive is plenty for temporary data storage. Thus yes, there is a market for this drive. Will everyone get it? Of course not.

 

[Concillian]

Judging by the size of the battery pack, it's 3 AAA or AA NiMH batteries (3.6v supplied by 3 NiMH cells is appropriate for RAM).

We're not afraid of hacking into things right?

So those who want more capacity for downtime will replace the 600-2300 mAH batteries with a 3 pack of ~7000-11000 mAH D cells strapped to the bottom of the case for several times the downtime capacity. Problem solved for a total additional investment ~$30-45 or so.

Worst case is it's a lithium ion pack, but from the shape of it, I kind of doubt it. It's a little tougher with lithium ion to expand capacity, but still perfectly do-able.

Bottom line is I think this can be easily hacked to get at least 48 hours or so of downtime capability, probably more on the order of a week, since I'm thinking those are AAA cells in there, in which case you're going to move up to ~120-150 hours capability.

 

[her34]

if people buy it (which is likely), we'll see other companies enter the market and better models. possible improvements:

-external version
-better battery life (although when was the last time a power outage lasted longer than 16 hours?)
-more ram slots. i don't think there's any reason it has to be limited to 4 slots.
-version that uses pci express 8x to transfer data instead of sata. or even 16x if mobo's come out with dual 16x slots.
-software to make image of ram drive to hdd every z hours, or before shut down, or whatever specification you want.

 

[Concillian]

Originally posted by: Pariah

Flash can hit about 70MB/s which due to the practically 0 access time it has makes it a true 70MB/s under all circumstances. That's very fast under normal usage patterns.

True, but "mainstream" flash (i.e. cheap) is around 6 MB/sec or so... slower than a HD. Fast flash is significantly more expensive than cheap flash.

For example you can get a gig of around "35x" flash media for like $50-70 or so. That's ~5.5 MB/sec. But a gig of "70x" is almost double the price, and you're only at ~11 MB/sec. for 50+ MB/sec you're talking EXPENSIVE flash. Not a little expensive... VERY expensive.

Flash is not a comparable product in terms of throughput. Though it does hold a charge. It also has relatively limited write cycles. Though for most of the applications discussed, writing is not going to be a major issue.