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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

i-RAM's Limitations

Since your data is stored on a volatile medium with the i-RAM, a loss of power could mean that everything stored on the card would be erased with no hopes for recovery.  While a lot of users may keep their computers on 24/7, there are always occasional power outages that would spell certain doom for i-RAM owners. In order to combat this possibility, Gigabyte outfitted the i-RAM with its own rechargeable battery pack. 

The battery pack takes 6 hours to charge completely and charges using the 3.3V power lines on its PCI connector.  With a full charge, the i-RAM is supposed to be able to keep the i-RAM's data safe for up to 16 hours.   Luckily, in most situations, the i-RAM will simply keep itself powered from the PCI slot.  As long as your power supply is still plugged in and turned on, regardless of whether or not your system is running, shut down or in standby mode, the i-RAM will still be powered by the 3.3V line feeding it from the PCI slot. 

There are only three conditions where the i-RAM runs off of battery power:
1) When the i-RAM is unplugged from the PCI slot;
2) When the power cable is unplugged from your power supply (or the power supply is disconnected from your motherboard; and
3) When the power button on your power supply is turned off.
For whatever reason, unplugging the i-RAM from the PCI slot causes its power consumption to go up considerably, and will actually drain its battery a lot quicker than the specified 16 hours.  We originally did this to test how long the i-RAM would last on battery power, but then were later told by Gigabyte not to do this because it puts the i-RAM in a state of accelerated battery consumption.

For the most part, the i-RAM will always be powered.  Your data is only at risk if you have a long-term power outage or you physically remove the i-RAM card. 

If you run out of battery power, you will lose all data and the i-RAM will stop appearing as a drive letter in Windows as soon as you power it back up.  You'll have to re-create the partition data and copy/install all of your files and programs over again. 

The card features four LEDs that indicate its status: PHY_READY, HD_LED, Full and Charging. 

The PHY_READY indicator simply lets you know if the Xilinx FPGA and the card are working properly.  The HD_LED is an activity indicator that is illuminated whenever you access the i-RAM.  The Full indicator turns green when the battery is fully charged, and the Charging indicator is lit amber when the battery is charging.  When the i-RAM is running on battery power, none of the LEDs are illuminated.  It would be nice if there was some way of knowing how much battery power is remaining on the i-RAM, for those rare situations where the i-RAM isn't being charged.  We have asked Gigabyte for some sort of battery life indicator in a future version of the i-RAM.

We All Scream for i-RAM Using the i-RAM
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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 great

  • Ged - 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.
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