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Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage

 by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 3:50 PM EST
133 Comments | Add A Comment
133 Comments

Using the i-RAM

To begin our testing, we loaded up the i-RAM with four 1GB DDR400 sticks.  We didn't have any large DDR200 modules, so unfortunately we had to go with more modern DDR400.  Using DDR500, DDR400 or DDR200 doesn't change performance at all, since the Xilinx controller runs them all at the same frequency. 

With all four banks populated, we connected the i-RAM to our ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe with a regular SATA cable and plugged the card into an open PCI slot. 

Powering the system on revealed the installation was a success; the BIOS reported the presence of the i-RAM as a regular storage device connected to our SATA controller:

Before Windows would recognize the drive, we had to create a partition on it, the same way you would a hard drive that had no partition on it initially.

After doing so, the i-RAM was completely functional as a regular hard drive:

The biggest difference that you notice with the i-RAM isn't necessarily its speed, but rather its sound - it's silent.  There are no moving parts, it's silent when the drive is accessed and it obviously doesn't have to spin up or down when the computer starts up.  These are all very obvious elements of the card, but they don't really sink in until you actually begin using it. 

Also, all disk accesses are instantaneous; formatting the thing takes no time at all, and you can even "defragment" it (although, you get no benefit from doing so).

With the setup done, it was time to evaluate the i-RAM as more than just a novelty silent  hard drive.  Armed with our 4GB partition, we started testing...

The Test

We ran all of our tests on the following testbed unless otherwise noted:

ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 Processor
1 GB OCZ 2:2:2:7 DDR400 RAM
Seagate 7200.7 120 GB Hard Drive (boot drive)
Western Digital Raptor W740GD (test drive)
Gigabyte i-RAM w/ 4x1GB DDR400 modules (test drive)

We used the latest nForce 6.53 and ForceWare 77.72 drivers for our test bed, and paired it with the recently released GeForce 7800 GTX.

i-RAM’s Limitations i-RAM Pure I/O Performance
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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.
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