Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 3:50 PM EST- Posted in
- 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 |
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| 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.
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Icehawk - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Huh, if this was at the $50 price point it would be a bit more interesting.I didn't like the pagefile test - it made no sense at all. Of course going from say 4b RAM to 2gb + 2gb iRam isn't going to improve the system... You needed to test what JUST changing the pagefile from HD to iRAM does.What about a typical 1gb RAM setup that most of us use? I still hit the pagefile on occasion and I do have ~1gb of old DDR I could use. Load times? No, I'd like to know if it smooths out gameplay. I know Doom 3 hiccups on my machine due to disk accesses.
Otherwise this doesn't look like it makes a lot of sense in its current incarnation.
lewis71980 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
No mention of using JBOD instead of Raid 0.That way with 4 pci slots used up you could get 16gb.
Maybe that would be enough space to do some proper server / databases.
Use a pair of normal 80 IDE HDD for os boot in raid 1 with file backup, from the i Ram card.
Braxus - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Know the article says it doesn't support ECC memory but will it still take it and run in in non-ECC mode? Most mobos I believe can at least do this. What about registered memory? Got a couple sticks of 1GB DDR266 RECC memory I'd like to use!RMSistight - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I definitely won't purchase this product until they implement SATA-II at 300Gb/s. Why should I shell out $150 for SATA150 when my DFI LanParty Ultra-D can do 300.I even asked one of the product managers at the AMD tech tour. I don't see why they wouldn't do it since SATA-II is backwards compatible to SATA-I.
Hacp - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
BTW I hate this new layout. i have to click it to read the next comment. Is there anyway to fix this? also the forums didn't get a makeover visual wise.LeftSide - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I wonder If the athlon x2 would have shown a diffrence in the multitaking tests, Instead of useing a fx57?Nanobaud - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
If more benches are to be done, I would put in a suggestion to test some compile times. Then I guess you should compare it to boosting youe system memory and installing a RAM drive, but this could be more convenient if you have those old 256 / 512 MB memory sticks lying around.nBd
Sunbird - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I want to know how long it will take the I-RAM to drain a standard UPS if the PC is off but connected to said UPS?jkostans - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
A while. You would have to find how much power is dissipated by the i-ram, then use the capacity of your UPS to get an exact number. I would go as far as to say maybe up to a month if you have a good ups.Zebo - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
$600 for 4GB (read useless) drive that maybe is not much faster than two 73GB drives in RAID 0 for half price? Uh Huh. If they sell 3000 I'll be shocked.