Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 3:50 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
i-RAM as a boot drive
Since the i-RAM appears as a normal hard drive, you can install Windows on it just like you would a regular hard drive with no extra drivers (assuming that none are needed for your SATA controller).A full install of Windows XP Pro can easily fit on a 4GB i-RAM and even on a 2GB i-RAM, but you have to be careful not to install applications into the C:\Program Files directory and disable System Restore for the i-RAM drive among other precautions. Why would you ever want to install your OS on an i-RAM card? We came up with two possibilities:
First off, loading your OS on the i-RAM will reduce boot times.
| Boot Time Comparison | |||||
Windows Boot Time (Lower is Better) |
|||||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 9.12s |
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| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 14.06s |
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With a Western Digital Raptor, you can go from the boot menu to the Windows desktop in 14.06 seconds; with the i-RAM, it takes 9.12 seconds. It's not instantaneous, but it's definitely quicker and noticeable.
Our thoughts are that with further optimization, the boot process can be better tuned for very low latency storage devices such as the i-RAM, but that won't happen with any currently shipping version of Windows.
The second reason for installing your OS on an i-RAM card is a bit more specific, but one we came up with when thinking about a secondary benefit of Gigabyte's i-RAM: it's silent.
You could theoretically build a home theater computer using just the i-RAM to hold your OS and map a network drive (hopefully kept in another room) to hold all of your media (e.g. music, movies, pictures, etc.). Paired with a silent PSU and a very quiet running CPU fan (maybe even on a Pentium M based system), you can have a truly silent HTPC, thanks to the i-RAM. You'd ideally want whatever database of your media collection to be stored on the network drive and not your OS, just in case something ever happened causing your i-RAM to lose its data, but it is a viable use for Gigabyte's 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 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.