Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage

Overall Performance

How does the i-RAM impact overall system performance? In order to find out, we installed Winstone on the drive and compared its benchmark results to the Raptor:

Overall Performance Comparison (Higher is Better)
	Business Winstone 2004	Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)	24.5	36.3
Western Digital Raptor (74GB)	23.9	35.4

What's very interesting here is that there's very little performance gain from running Winstone on the i-RAM, which tells us that Winstone isn't nearly as disk bound as we originally thought.

We wanted to run other benchmark suites on the i-RAM; however, we ran into capacity issues once again.

One of the biggest advantages of the i-RAM is its random access performance, which comes into play particularly in multitasking scenarios where there are a lot of disk accesses. In order to see if this translates into any tangible real world performance gains, we turned to the Multitasking Business Winstone tests:

"This test uses the same applications as the Business Winstone test, but runs some of them in the background. The test has three segments: in the first, files copy in the background while the script runs Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer in the foreground. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the second segment. In that segment, Excel and Word operations run in the foreground while WinZip archives in the background. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the third segment. In that segment, Norton AntiVirus runs a virus check in the background while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft FrontPage, and WinZip operations run in the foreground."

Winstone Multitasking Performance Comparison (Higher is Better)
	Test 1	Test 2	Test 3
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)	5.55	2.98	3.1
Western Digital Raptor (74GB)	2.78	2.93	3.04

The biggest performance gain is in the first multitasking test, which is the file copy test while Outlook and IE run. The performance advantage here is tremendous, with the i-RAM generating a score almost twice that of the Raptor.

The rest of the tests show very little performance improvement. We'd guess that the majority of the boost in the first test is due to the file copy that takes place during the run.