Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 3:50 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
File Copy and Archive Performance
The one area where the i-RAM truly offered impressive performance was when copying files on the i-RAM itself, mainly because a file copy is mostly an I/O bound process.| 300MB File Copy | |||||
Time in Seconds (Lower is Better) |
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| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 25.25s |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 77.689s |
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Copying a 300MB folder containing the Firefox source code from the Raptor to itself took about 77 seconds, yielding just under 4MB/s. Doing the same on the i-RAM took about 25 seconds, resulting in an average transfer rate of about 12MB/s. Note that both the Raptor and the i-RAM were far from their peak theoretical transfer rates, indicating that even the i-RAM is susceptible to some sort of performance overhead.
Next up? Copying a 693MB iso from the drive to itself:
| 693MB File Copy | |||||
Time in Seconds (Lower is Better) |
|||||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 6.922s |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 26.304s |
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The i-RAM averaged around 100MB/s and copied the file in 6.922 seconds. The Raptor did so in 26.305 seconds at an average of 26.3MB/s.
Finally, we copied our 1.7GB Battlefield 2 install directory:
| 1.76GB File Copy | |||||
Time in Seconds (Lower is Better) |
|||||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 31.719s |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 95.953s |
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Archive operations are also a lot quicker on the i-RAM. Here's how long it took to create a RAR archive of our Firefox source folder:
| WinRAR Archive Creation | |||||
Time in Seconds (Lower is Better) |
|||||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 57s |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 70s |
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Un-archiving a 382MB RAR set provided a much closer competition between the Raptor and the i-RAM:
| WinRAR Archive Extraction | |||||
Time in Seconds (Lower is Better) |
|||||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 15s |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 19s |
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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.