Interesting to see that even with a nominal 1.5 Gbps bus the i-ram tops out just over 130 MB/s. I wonder if that SATA limits or the southbridge bus? I think the southbridge bus is 2G Bytes /s compared to SATA's 1.5G bits /s -- less than 1/10th of the southbridge. I think it's just a matter of there...

I hooked up my own i-RAMs over a Siig 3112r PCI card, first as a single drive, then in RAID0. The RAID didn't make much difference and there wasn't as much difference in throughput as I expected -- about 115MB/s compared to 112MB/s as a single drive over PCI and 132MB/s as a single drive over the IC...

Butcher wrote:Problem with the i-ram is the bus limitations. I wonder how well a similar device hooked up to u320 would perform.

Even SATAII would be a nice jump.

I finally managed to get a working RAID0 with the i-RAMs. Unfortunately, I had to do it with a Siig 3112r PCI card. I have a slower drive, but 8GB instead of 4. :D CPU usage is surpisingly low for a software RAID. Transfer isn't too bad considering it's going over the PCI bus. Latency has become mea...

There's no mystery here, the maximum bandwidth of 32bit PCI is 132MB/sec. So right, 150MB/sec SATA is limited by the PCI bus. The question is, how much is it limiting it. I found with a Raptor setup the same way that it was only getting about 30MB/s, far below the PCI bus' rated 132MB/s and far bel...

Hi, justblair.

I love it! I have a simular setup, but with nowhere near the elegance of your's. View of Desk I've come to enjoy not having a tower, or any other kind of case. You can see the mechanics of the setup by clicking my sig. Once again, really nice job.

I like the idea of disabling LAN etc in BIOS, as long as Windows will still recognise it? I'm not recommending it. :D And no, Windows wont see any on-board hardware you disable in the BIOS. You can give it a try. It wont hurt anything. Just re-enable it when you're done. I do happen to keep my LAN,...

I'm surprised by the slow startup though, as there are a few video's around showing FAST startups of windows. Don't be surprised. Mine starts almost as fast as that, before drivers. I could probably tune it to be that fast by using just 256 MB of RAM, disabling pagefile, and removing any and all ha...

Excellent info, Eunos. I finally got my I-RAM functional today and can add a few more impressions for the thread. Mine was a Revision 1.3 complete with 3.5 gigs worth of generic PC3200 RAM, all shipped from the US. The extra .5 gb was a 512 chip that I wanted to use since it was lying around, though...

Congratulations!

it appears that transcend just released a couple 1.8" and 2.5" flash hard drives. the size is limited to 2, 4, and 8 gb, but it would be adequate to place the os on it to allow faster boot up. http://www.transcendusa.com/products/ModDetail.asp?ModNo=100 any one have any experience with these flash ...

The noise is evidently produced by the method the X800GTO/ATITool uses to control the GPU fan header, and it seems to be the worst at the 5% setting. So, if you have a decent stock GPU cooler, the noise may not be the fault of its fan, and you may find your aftermarket cooler is not as quiet as it ...

I ordered a new Asus motherboard with an SIS southbridge that Gigabyte lists as compatable for RAID. My Intel ICH5R wont run the i-RAMs in RAID0. Hopefully the new board will work and we can get some numbers from two i-RAMs in RAID0. I'm interested to see if the software RAID defeats any advantage ...

RAID0 was a no-go even on the Asus board. Gigabyte listed the SiS 964 southbrigde as compatable w/RAID but all I get is the same BSOD as on the ICH5R. I give up. I'm done. I'm happy. No 200+ MB/s RAID0 with latency in the nano-seconds, but I'm happy. I'm happy.


I'm happy.

I'm happy.

The AGP slot is probably the most secure of them all. It has the clip at the rear holding it in place. But even the PCI cards stay in place without any problem. This is true even of the i-RAMs which are pretty heavy.

That's pretty slick, flyingsherpa.

I have a similar question. Do you think that an Asus N6600 can be passively cooled with an NB47 in a P180? It will only be used in 2D, no gaming. Should I try it? It's supposed to consume less than 30 watts. You can try it. I breifly put one on my X1600Pro and it went to well over 100C, like 115-12...

I ordered a new motherboard to hopefully successfully test the i-RAMs in RAID0. err, does that mean you're getting rid of your 875PBZ and 3.4EE? If so, I'd like to be at the top of the "dibs" list. :) The new board, an Asus budget model with an SiS chipset, is supposed to run the EE. We'll see. I s...

Some updates are in order. Hardware is updated to include two i-RAMs and an X850XT PE cooled with a V1-Ultra. Still not quite done yet. I ordered a new motherboard to hopefully successfully test the i-RAMs in RAID0. The ICH5R southbridge on my Intel board wont do it. HARDWARE: Power Supply: Coolmax ...

This setup really isn't appropriate for a standard computer with a case, but I thought I'd show you what I have. I tilted the 120mm fan I use to cool the CPU so that it also blows on the V1-Ultra radiator. The fan runs at 5v and is inaudible behind my desk. Pics below: http://www.velocity.net/~tangl...

Those are excellent results, Mits. Congrats.

has *anyone* heard of a CF card being used for a PC that has broken due to too many writes? cuz there are a few people who use them (i have a very small one i use ocassionally for w98) here and i haven't heard of a single person having read-write problems? I never got past the install phase. It was...

I think CF cards also use a PIO interface rather than DMA. I don't understand the mechanics, but the results are easy to articulate. We end up with a system drive that works like a floppy drive - freezing all system resources during read and writes. I'm sure the upcoming 32GB flash drive from Samung...

mits wrote:What are your system temps (CPU and mobo) with the V1?

I don't use a case, so VGA has virtually no effect on other temps. My motherboard and power supply are mounted to the back of my desk, out of sight.

I can't hear my 36GB Raptor over my lawn mower. :D I'm just teasing. I don't think the iRAM is the end-all, be-all of hard drives. I'm just pointing out that for the performance and quiet it offers i think the price is in line, and in some cases, better than what we see in the rest of the market. By...

The V1-Ultra does come with a 15 X 80 fan. A noisy one at that.

Compare the cost and performance of today's flagship SCSI drives to the i-RAM with RAM. The i-RAM costs less and blows SCSI away in both transfer speed and latency. And you don't have to listen to the singing of a 15K SCSI drive.

For Example

What security do you guys put in place to stop you accedentally wiping the RAM drive? For example can you run a RAID 1 setup with a small laptop HDD (for noise reasons) without performace loss? I'm looking into software to image the drive onto a storage drive. I have a Samsung notebook drive that i...

I've noticed in my system that hardware - or hardware drivers - impact boot time. When I first install XP and chipset drivers it boots really fast. The progress bar on XP's boot splash screen doesn't hardly make it half way across before it disappears. After installing the driver for my Creative X-F...

Hey, Dan.

The i-RAM make Windows pretty zippy, doesn't it? I like it a lot.

What southbrigde are you using?