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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Aganack1 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
i thought they said that they were only going to make 1000. enought for the crazies who have money to burn...P.S. if any of you crazies are reading this i could burn some of that money for you... just let me know.
Houdani - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Thanks for running through the multiple roles for which the iRam might be useful. I'm rather surprised it wasn't MORE useful in the benches. I'd be interested in learning (i.e. slacking back and reading the results of someone else's research) why the i-Ram is still as large a bottleneck as it is. Yes it's faster than the HD, but why isn't it much, much faster? Are we seeing OS inefficiency or something else altogether?In the end, though, it doesn't fit my needs particularly well, so I'll pass this round. Maybe a future version will be more appealing in terms of cost, speed, size.
Sunbird - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
maybe the SATA interface isn't fast enough?pio!pio! - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I'm constantly shuffling 1--3 gb mpeg2 files around...this would be greatGed - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Would it be possible for an NVIDIA or ATI graphics card that used TurboCache or HyperMemory to make use of the i-RAM?That might be interesting.
Anton74 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
No, absolutely not. Even if it were, the SATA interface is *way* too slow to be of use for something like that.And even if that were not a factor, why spend that kind of money on the i-RAM where the same amount would buy a *much* superior video card with its own dedicated memory?
Anton
kleinwl - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I think that this would be very helpful as a page file for workstations. Older workstations may be maxed out with 4GB and windows 2000 (which the company does not want to move over to xp-64) and still need additional ram for CAD/CFD/etc. This would be an easy upgrade with a reasonable amount of performance increase.sandorski - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Was hoping it would offer more, especially as a Pagefile. Any plans to make a PCI-e version(IIRC PCI-e has a ton more bandwidth than SATA), that would likely make this a Must-have. As it stands now I'd only use it for the silence in a HT Setup.Gatak - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Using PCI/PCI-e for transfers would require OS drivers which wouldn't be available for all OSes.sprockkets - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Keep in mind that for many years the ide/sata controllers are NOT on the PCI bus of the southbridge, so PCI is not a limitation.