*FINALLY*

[flashbacck]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
When you upgrade to DDRII you could simply use your old memory in this drive. 150MB/sec and 5ns seek times dont appeal to you?

This is why the product is so attractive. What else are you guys going to do with your old DDR sticks? Might as well run your windows swap file on it!

 

[ai42]

Originally posted by: 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.

I agree it is very possible to hack this to run on larger batteries. I agree it is likely a NiMH batteries considering the extra circuitry to charge/discharge LiIon (and the relative bareness of the board) I don't see this being LiIon.

Personally I think this might be more worthwhile to provide for a external power supply hack. Pretty easy to find a 3.6v power brick and nice plugs if you want it to look pretty. External power brick would provide almost infinate time with the computer being off (provided your power doesn't go out, but if your smart you run it on a UPS, and it could be wired as such to still keep the small internal battery).

Finally I think this is a half dead product from the start. No doubt Gigabyte will come to market with this card (they have the PCB design all setup, and paid some EE big bucks already, and likely already has fabrication of the bare compoents already done) However, with its inherient flaws this is definetly an enthusiets product. Not many people are willing to pay $320+50 (using $80/1Gb stick cost) for a 4GB hard drive irregardless of the speed. Now certainly there might be some server applications for this product (Rocket Card was mentioned on this first page) for say a large business who has a heavily accessed database and want's to minimmize seek time (and as far as the computer being on 24/7 that isnt so much an issue honestly). This is definetely more refined than the RocketCard but either this product gets very stale (and there is no need to push for using faster RAM considering the limitation of SATA interface) or it just dies entirely. I say it will depend if the server market gets intrested in this product but at $50 it may be too cheap.

I may have to get one I like small lost causes (I really liked Nvidia SoundStorm btw). Maybe wait for some great deals on some RAM.

 

[Brian23]

Originally posted by: ai42

Originally posted by: 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.

I agree it is very possible to hack this to run on larger batteries. I agree it is likely a NiMH batteries considering the extra circuitry to charge/discharge LiIon (and the relative bareness of the board) I don't see this being LiIon.

Personally I think this might be more worthwhile to provide for a external power supply hack. Pretty easy to find a 3.6v power brick and nice plugs if you want it to look pretty. External power brick would provide almost infinate time with the computer being off (provided your power doesn't go out, but if your smart you run it on a UPS, and it could be wired as such to still keep the small internal battery).

Finally I think this is a half dead product from the start. No doubt Gigabyte will come to market with this card (they have the PCB design all setup, and paid some EE big bucks already, and likely already has fabrication of the bare compoents already done) However, with its inherient flaws this is definetly an enthusiets product. Not many people are willing to pay $320+50 (using $80/1Gb stick cost) for a 4GB hard drive irregardless of the speed. Now certainly there might be some server applications for this product (Rocket Card was mentioned on this first page) for say a large business who has a heavily accessed database and want's to minimmize seek time (and as far as the computer being on 24/7 that isnt so much an issue honestly). This is definetely more refined than the RocketCard but either this product gets very stale (and there is no need to push for using faster RAM considering the limitation of SATA interface) or it just dies entirely. I say it will depend if the server market gets intrested in this product but at $50 it may be too cheap.

I may have to get one I like small lost causes (I really liked Nvidia SoundStorm btw). Maybe wait for some great deals on some RAM.

I agree. I want to support them so that more developement is done in this area. I also want it for tinkering.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: 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:

It does get hit though, because MS programmed their OS to put certain files in swap all the time, so disabling it delivers a crippling blow to performance. Leaving it on, causes HD caching for the stupidest things (like surfing with IE, even with browser cache disabled).

 

[remagavon]

This would be great for a photoshop scratch disk.

 

[imported_FruFruMcGee]

why not have it set up like a turbo button, backup the whole 2 gb to a real hard drive when its not being used. when you are going to be on the computer transfer it all to the ramdrive and enjoy the instant load times

 

[feelingshorter]

Originally posted by: Bar81
Yeah, all that is cool and everything except for the crap 16 hour battery. This is a dead product.

Toshiba, will be releasing a new battery chemistry later in the future that could probably e used to replae the 16 hour battery.

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by: 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.

I'm aware of what is going on in the flash market. None of the above is relevant, as I'm not talking about the MP3 player/digital camera flash memory. I'm only talking about the high end flash that is already being used now in highend SSD drives. When comparing true SSD drives (not hack jobs like this PCI card), flash based drives are generally cheaper than DRAM drives due to their simpler design, and no need for a battery (or built in disc).

The huge throughput advantage you talk about is largely irrelevant for hard drives. It's all about access time which highend flash is very competitive with DRAM based SSD. Home users simply don't move huge amounts of data constantly to benefit from extremely high throughput. This is easily proven by comparing how little RAID benefits the home user in benchmarks. When adding a 2nd drive, basically everything is the same except that throughput is nearly doubled. Yet that typically results in a 10% or less improvement in performance. A 100% throughput increase for a 10% real world performance is nothing to get excited about. This Gigabyte solution is benchmarking at about 115MB/s which is less than a 65% increase over what flash is capable. So what does that equate to, about 6.5% increase? Who cares, it's generally accepted that 10% increase is necessary for a perceptible increase in HD performance.

It does get hit though, because MS programmed their OS to put certain files in swap all the time, so disabling it delivers a crippling blow to performance. Leaving it on, causes HD caching for the stupidest things (like surfing with IE, even with browser cache disabled).

Windows does a very good job of memory management, people who bash it don't understand what it is doing or why it is doing it. Disabling Windows page file does not improve performance, and under some circumstances can cause serious system stability issues since some applications require the page file to run properly.

One thing that seems to be being ignored is the fact it appears this product will only work with Gigabyte motherboards which will eliminate most of the potential market. If you plan on buying a GB MB just to use one of these, the price gets a bit uglier than it's already poor value.

 

[Pariah]

One other thing to add. The announced Samsung SSD notebook drives look a whole lot more enticing and usable. What remains to be seen is the cost, which will obviously be higher than one of these GB solutions, but just how much will determine how desirable this product will be. The GB option will be DOA as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Zebo]

I use the slowest HDD's on the market (I think) in seagates 8mb cached 7200 rpm IDE not even Sata and have zero issue. Use one as a C: holding all apps, one D: w/ swap and backup, and "my docs" as well as all other user created files.


I think anand proved, for the average user and gamer it's not drive speeds that counts when he matched up RAID 0 raptors against my slow drives, but CPU instead loading-decompressing textures and such.

Admittingly I don't know much about HDD performances and intricacies of various configs, but I know price/performance, until you prove to me the price premium is justified w/ real world performance I'm not buying it.

Space, time, and cost are still huge issues.

 

[Zebo]

Man I miss Modus... He'd destory this like he did SCSI.

 

[Bushman5]

man id so load games on that. cs source. load up some huge ram stick super fast and load cs to ti and pow load times destroyed =)

 

[jpeyton]

I think A LOT of you guys are truly underestimating the performance gains to be made from this device.

Wait until it's released and some reviews will come out. These things will sell like hotcakes, guaranteed.

The bottom line, for application specific use, this thing will provide huge performance gains.

Example Benchmark:

Two PCs, one with a Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz and the i-RAM, and one with a Pentium 4 @ 4.0GHz and a fast SATAII drive. Photoshop filter test suite is the benchmark. For the PC @ 2.8GHz, you store the PSD file and the scratch disk on the i-RAM device, and for the PC @ 4.0GHz, you store the PSD and scratch disk on the SATAII drive.

The PC with the i-RAM will win all the Photoshop tests. Now imagine configuring the same benchmarks for other applications, like video/audio file encoders, etc.

Imagine a $50 card + cheap DDR increasing performance in applications more than a top of the line processor upgrade.

 

[Brian23]

Originally posted by: jpeyton
I think A LOT of you guys are truly underestimating the performance gains to be made from this device.

Wait until it's released and some reviews will come out. These things will sell like hotcakes, guaranteed.

The bottom line, for application specific use, this thing will provide huge performance gains.

Example Benchmark:

Two PCs, one with a Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz and the i-RAM, and one with a Pentium 4 @ 4.0GHz and a fast SATAII drive. Photoshop filter test suite is the benchmark. For the PC @ 2.8GHz, you store the PSD file and the scratch disk on the i-RAM device, and for the PC @ 4.0GHz, you store the PSD and scratch disk on the SATAII drive.

The PC with the i-RAM will win all the Photoshop tests. Now imagine configuring the same benchmarks for other applications, like video/audio file encoders, etc.

Imagine a $50 card + cheap DDR increasing performance in applications more than a top of the line processor upgrade.

I have a feeling it will help even more with a dual core CPU. A problem with DC is keeping both fed with data; this will solve that problem.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Pariah

Originally posted by: 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.

I'm aware of what is going on in the flash market. None of the above is relevant, as I'm not talking about the MP3 player/digital camera flash memory. I'm only talking about the high end flash that is already being used now in highend SSD drives. When comparing true SSD drives (not hack jobs like this PCI card), flash based drives are generally cheaper than DRAM drives due to their simpler design, and no need for a battery (or built in disc).

The huge throughput advantage you talk about is largely irrelevant for hard drives. It's all about access time which highend flash is very competitive with DRAM based SSD. Home users simply don't move huge amounts of data constantly to benefit from extremely high throughput. This is easily proven by comparing how little RAID benefits the home user in benchmarks. When adding a 2nd drive, basically everything is the same except that throughput is nearly doubled. Yet that typically results in a 10% or less improvement in performance. A 100% throughput increase for a 10% real world performance is nothing to get excited about. This Gigabyte solution is benchmarking at about 115MB/s which is less than a 65% increase over what flash is capable. So what does that equate to, about 6.5% increase? Who cares, it's generally accepted that 10% increase is necessary for a perceptible increase in HD performance.

It does get hit though, because MS programmed their OS to put certain files in swap all the time, so disabling it delivers a crippling blow to performance. Leaving it on, causes HD caching for the stupidest things (like surfing with IE, even with browser cache disabled).

Windows does a very good job of memory management, people who bash it don't understand what it is doing or why it is doing it. Disabling Windows page file does not improve performance, and under some circumstances can cause serious system stability issues since some applications require the page file to run properly.

One thing that seems to be being ignored is the fact it appears this product will only work with Gigabyte motherboards which will eliminate most of the potential market. If you plan on buying a GB MB just to use one of these, the price gets a bit uglier than it's already poor value.

So for example, you think there is no advantage to loading World of Warcrafts hundreds of files and 300-700MB at 300MB/sec vs 60 on a raptor? Instant loading on ports and zoning would be a godsend in that game, and the hard drive is thrashed near constantly during travel, causing stuttering on even the highest end systems.

 

[Pariah]

117MB/s, not 300MB/s. Where are you getting 300? Would I spend $50 on this card, plus another $250 in RAM plus the cost of Gigabyte motherboard, for a minimal speed boost in one game? Not in this lifetime. There are applications where this product makes sense and will offer a very good performance boost. WOW is not one of them (or any other game).

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Pariah
117MB/s, not 300MB/s. Where are you getting 300? Would I spend $50 on this card, plus another $250 in RAM plus the cost of Gigabyte motherboard, for a minimal speed boost in one game? Not in this lifetime. There are applications where this product makes sense and will offer a very good performance boost. WOW is not one of them (or any other game).

Where are you getting 117MB/sec? SATAII caps at 300MB/sec, the memory itself is 2100MB/sec. Youll get 60 on a raptor if youre lucky.

Also you dont need a gigabyte mobo, way to read the article.

 

[Pariah]

Where are you getting 117MB/sec?

From actual benchmarks of the product.

RAM disk add-in card - Gigabyte's fast data storage

So again, where are you getting 300MB/s from besides your fanciful imagination? Where have you seen SATA II attached to this product anywhere? No where, because the benchmarks show this is obviously a SATA I product.

Also you dont need a gigabyte mobo, way to read the article.

From Anand's own article:

Gigabyte Brings Solid State Storage to the Mainstream

"In an effort to differentiate themselves from other motherboard manufacturers, Gigabyte has introduced a number of interesting add-ons for their motherboards, the most interesting of which is their $50 RAMDISK PCI card."

Pretty difficult to differentiate your boards, if your add-ons work on everyone else's boards. Way to read the article.

 

[BalAtWork]

Just between my friends alone, I bet within a year or two I could collect enough sticks of memory to make a 200G HD for free based on this approach. I mean as soon they change the memory standard all the old stuff becomes dirt cheap to buy and free in old systems discarded.

In 2 yrs you could have this same approach for a 10-15G drive for the same price as you guys are quoting now. HD technology advances a lot slower than other technologies......spin faster and buffer. NCQ is more of an interface change to improve the process but not an actual new approach technology.

This would make windoze seem instantaneous to an average user.

Ideally i could see an external inclosure connected via SATA/Firewire/USB etc with like how ever many slots they could fit into their inclosure.

 

[CrispyFried]

It does say "regular 32 bit pci card." Why wouldnt it work on any mobo.

 

[Pariah]

Three words

Incompatible by design

 

[Sqube]

Originally posted by: CrispyFried
It does say "regular 32 bit pci card." Why wouldnt it work on any mobo.

That's what I was thinking too. Glancing at the article, it says a regular PCI card, no additional drivers, and everything that tells the SATA controller to see it as a hard drive is on the PCB itself.

Just from reading the article, I'm not quite sure how Gigabyte is going to go about making this hardware proprietary.

 

[Pariah]

Something as simple as a BIOS check at post should work. If no Gigabyte compatible BIOS is found, then the card doesn't initialize.

 

[pelikan]

I use nLite to strip XP down to a less than 2gb install, incuding the page file (1gb). It would be fun to put XP on one of these cards with 2gb of cheap ram and see what it feels like.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Sqube

Originally posted by: CrispyFried
It does say "regular 32 bit pci card." Why wouldnt it work on any mobo.

That's what I was thinking too. Glancing at the article, it says a regular PCI card, no additional drivers, and everything that tells the SATA controller to see it as a hard drive is on the PCB itself.

Just from reading the article, I'm not quite sure how Gigabyte is going to go about making this hardware proprietary.

exactly what i was thinking.