Gigabyte's RAM drive card w/battery backup...
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
-
- Posts: 37
- Joined: Fri May 13, 2005 8:33 am
This product appeals to the geek in me, and indeed I was excited when reading the opening specs in this thread; a price point astronomically lower than similar products like the Rocket Drive, what amounts to bootable SATA, access in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds, and of course the sexy silence of solid-state storage. This even fits my current project where I have the most space (PCI slots).
My main concern is the 4GB limit, closely followed by the price.
4GB isn't enough for me. There are too many inconveniences when buying a drive that can't fit my OS and all my apps: I don't want to buy another HDD for apps due to performance, space, noise, and cost concerns, I don't want to put my apps on my storage drive due to peformance and organizational concerns, I won't run XP Home or XP Pro Lite Whatever, and I won't go back to the days of worrying whether or not I can fit new apps on my drive, let alone keep track of 'important' apps on one drive and the rest somewhere else. 8GB would provide me plenty of comfort but would certainly be too pricey for me.
I tend to build budget-oriented PCs that serve me as all-in-one solutions for all my computer needs, with each iteration serving as my main rig. I also classify SPCR users into 3 main types: those who at least start out with (near) absolute silence in mind and build the most powerful pc for their needs from there, those who start out wanting the most powerful pc for their needs and quiet what they can from there, and those who aim to build extremely quiet PCs with decent power for their needs from the getgo. I also see every degree in between, but I digress.
For the sake of this discussion (If I can call it that; This has been the only SPCR thread I have disliked reading), I see this product as appealing to those in the first two categories, or those with different computing habits and desires. It sure looks to be quiet and it sure looks to be fast, but for a budget-oriented, 'middle-road' silencer with my habits it's just not ready. I'll have to pass on this if it's released this summer; maybe for mynext build this tech will have what I'm looking for.
My main concern is the 4GB limit, closely followed by the price.
4GB isn't enough for me. There are too many inconveniences when buying a drive that can't fit my OS and all my apps: I don't want to buy another HDD for apps due to performance, space, noise, and cost concerns, I don't want to put my apps on my storage drive due to peformance and organizational concerns, I won't run XP Home or XP Pro Lite Whatever, and I won't go back to the days of worrying whether or not I can fit new apps on my drive, let alone keep track of 'important' apps on one drive and the rest somewhere else. 8GB would provide me plenty of comfort but would certainly be too pricey for me.
I tend to build budget-oriented PCs that serve me as all-in-one solutions for all my computer needs, with each iteration serving as my main rig. I also classify SPCR users into 3 main types: those who at least start out with (near) absolute silence in mind and build the most powerful pc for their needs from there, those who start out wanting the most powerful pc for their needs and quiet what they can from there, and those who aim to build extremely quiet PCs with decent power for their needs from the getgo. I also see every degree in between, but I digress.
For the sake of this discussion (If I can call it that; This has been the only SPCR thread I have disliked reading), I see this product as appealing to those in the first two categories, or those with different computing habits and desires. It sure looks to be quiet and it sure looks to be fast, but for a budget-oriented, 'middle-road' silencer with my habits it's just not ready. I'll have to pass on this if it's released this summer; maybe for mynext build this tech will have what I'm looking for.
Sorry folks but I'm failing to see what problem you think that this extra bandwidth that appears as a filesystem would solve that wouldn't be solved by plugging enough memory into your PCI-E capable Athlon64/Opteron motherboard that can cope with 4/8/16/32GB of memory in the first place. Adding more complex (read: expensive) combinations of this, that and the other interface tech just make the 64-bit mobo+RAM solution look more cost effective.Natronomonas wrote:But... PCI-Ex16... data reads at multi gb per sec... mmmmm : )
Your general computing experience is limited by two things: the size of your RAM and the seek time of your hard drive, *not* by the bandwidth of your hard drive. This device is emulating a hard-drive with zero seek time, which is why it boosts performance: extra bandwidth will buy you almost precisely nothing.
To summarise: if you are latency limited, buy one of these. If you are bandwidth limited, buy a proper motherboard with enough RAM. If you are capacity limited, buy a quiet hard-drive.
-
- Posts: 419
- Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 1:05 pm
- Location: Palo Alto, CA
Me? I'm noise limited This will eliminate the last source of noise from my system. True silence? Priceless.nutball wrote:To summarise: if you are latency limited, buy one of these. If you are bandwidth limited, buy a proper motherboard with enough RAM. If you are capacity limited, buy a quiet hard-drive.
Oh, and the performance won't hurt, either.
"True silence? Very very pricey! Very Happy"
^bah, not always!
"But many companies seem to report external transfer rates (USB, internet, etc.) in kilobits/megabits, which can be deceiving."
i'm sure that is pretty much the *only* reason. here, at a PC forum, and a specialist (non-n00bish) one at that, and people still get duped. this is how firewire has died cuz everyone (me included for a long time) thought it was slower than usb2; 400 vs 480, but USB is the burst rate, firewire is the sustained transfer rate.. marketing can be very decietful.
"The beauty of this though is as it uses the SATA interface for communication it looks like a regular drive to the OS - whichever flavour you run. Otherwise, you'd need special drivers etc to make it work as a boot/swap drive etc.
So while the extra bandwidth would be great, it would potentially be much harder to utilise in a wide-ranging fashion.
But... PCI-Ex16... data reads at multi gb per sec... mmmmm : )"
well
1) PCI-E x1 is the replacement for PCI
2) PCI-E x16, is the same technology, only 16 lanes
3) u can have PCI controller cards which connect to ur HDD; so a drive can look like a regular drive to the OS, whilst all the data is being transferred down the PCI 'lane'.. in the future (maybe now) as PCI dissapears these will need to be on PCI-E x1 slots, so the tech must be there.
"Something else to take into consideration is whether PCI 16x slots provide +5Vsb. I'd assume they do, but I don't know for sure."
again, working on the principle than PCI-e x1 is replacing PCI (and x16 is the same as), there must be something like this which would work..
"It seems like you'd probably be getting the best "bang for your buck" by buying two of these things, and filling up the slots of each with a bunch of cheapo 512MB sticks"
that would leave u in the messy situation of having 2x 2gb drives! maybe u could use raid (some #) so that they are seen as one drive.. but that would be messy i'd think.. i am just starting to see the price of 1GB sticks come down here, there are (literally) 1 or 2 brands which are getting close to 2x the price of 512mb.
might work for some thou.. having said all that, we certainly can't get 512mb ram for £25, let alone $25
nutball, its bootable.. ram isn't.. it saves stuff.. ram doesn't..
"Your general computing experience is limited by two things: the size of your RAM and the seek time of your hard drive, *not* by the bandwidth of your hard drive. This device is emulating a hard-drive with zero seek time, which is why it boosts performance: extra bandwidth will buy you almost precisely nothing."
very good point, we dont transfer more than 300MB/s very often (althou to say we aren't limited by sustained tranfer rates of HDDs i'm not so sure).. but i dont see the harm in having a version which is 10x faster.. for exampe the smallest u may notice is maybe 0.1s? so thats 30MB transferred.. which is very common; so higher bandwidth may give better performance at the margins. plus if u want to do something like save all ur ram (hibernate style) to disk then that will change a few seconds into practically instantly.
still see no reason why *not* to have a PCI-E x16 card.. gigabyte are pretty experienced with it afterall..
and, i *would* like to see this thing be able to adjust voltages for the ram.. if its only going to run @ 100mhz (/pc1600), then any pc3200 could surely be reduced voltage decently below 2.5v (has anyone ever undervolted ram?? can any boards do that?).. if anyone was planning to run this thing as part of a no moving parts system, then the heat produced by 4+ extra ram sticks is very significant! working on cpu principles i guess it would be half the heat, but voltage adjustment would be very handy still.
how do i email (someone important) at gigabyte?
^bah, not always!
"But many companies seem to report external transfer rates (USB, internet, etc.) in kilobits/megabits, which can be deceiving."
i'm sure that is pretty much the *only* reason. here, at a PC forum, and a specialist (non-n00bish) one at that, and people still get duped. this is how firewire has died cuz everyone (me included for a long time) thought it was slower than usb2; 400 vs 480, but USB is the burst rate, firewire is the sustained transfer rate.. marketing can be very decietful.
"The beauty of this though is as it uses the SATA interface for communication it looks like a regular drive to the OS - whichever flavour you run. Otherwise, you'd need special drivers etc to make it work as a boot/swap drive etc.
So while the extra bandwidth would be great, it would potentially be much harder to utilise in a wide-ranging fashion.
But... PCI-Ex16... data reads at multi gb per sec... mmmmm : )"
well
1) PCI-E x1 is the replacement for PCI
2) PCI-E x16, is the same technology, only 16 lanes
3) u can have PCI controller cards which connect to ur HDD; so a drive can look like a regular drive to the OS, whilst all the data is being transferred down the PCI 'lane'.. in the future (maybe now) as PCI dissapears these will need to be on PCI-E x1 slots, so the tech must be there.
"Something else to take into consideration is whether PCI 16x slots provide +5Vsb. I'd assume they do, but I don't know for sure."
again, working on the principle than PCI-e x1 is replacing PCI (and x16 is the same as), there must be something like this which would work..
"It seems like you'd probably be getting the best "bang for your buck" by buying two of these things, and filling up the slots of each with a bunch of cheapo 512MB sticks"
that would leave u in the messy situation of having 2x 2gb drives! maybe u could use raid (some #) so that they are seen as one drive.. but that would be messy i'd think.. i am just starting to see the price of 1GB sticks come down here, there are (literally) 1 or 2 brands which are getting close to 2x the price of 512mb.
might work for some thou.. having said all that, we certainly can't get 512mb ram for £25, let alone $25
nutball, its bootable.. ram isn't.. it saves stuff.. ram doesn't..
"Your general computing experience is limited by two things: the size of your RAM and the seek time of your hard drive, *not* by the bandwidth of your hard drive. This device is emulating a hard-drive with zero seek time, which is why it boosts performance: extra bandwidth will buy you almost precisely nothing."
very good point, we dont transfer more than 300MB/s very often (althou to say we aren't limited by sustained tranfer rates of HDDs i'm not so sure).. but i dont see the harm in having a version which is 10x faster.. for exampe the smallest u may notice is maybe 0.1s? so thats 30MB transferred.. which is very common; so higher bandwidth may give better performance at the margins. plus if u want to do something like save all ur ram (hibernate style) to disk then that will change a few seconds into practically instantly.
still see no reason why *not* to have a PCI-E x16 card.. gigabyte are pretty experienced with it afterall..
and, i *would* like to see this thing be able to adjust voltages for the ram.. if its only going to run @ 100mhz (/pc1600), then any pc3200 could surely be reduced voltage decently below 2.5v (has anyone ever undervolted ram?? can any boards do that?).. if anyone was planning to run this thing as part of a no moving parts system, then the heat produced by 4+ extra ram sticks is very significant! working on cpu principles i guess it would be half the heat, but voltage adjustment would be very handy still.
how do i email (someone important) at gigabyte?
given that a typical configuration of this device is 2-4gb, it's clearly storage bound.
what kind of software/applications are mostly latency bound?
from what i read, the suggestion was put forth to put windows xp for fast boot-up. would you endores this recommendation for the majority of users of everyday use?
what kind of software/applications are mostly latency bound?
from what i read, the suggestion was put forth to put windows xp for fast boot-up. would you endores this recommendation for the majority of users of everyday use?
There are 4GB PC1600 sticks, but you're looking at a cool grand per stick. By the time you have populated your RAM drive, you're probably about the same cost as a true IDE flash disk of the same capacity.perplex wrote:is the 4GB an actual limit? or are people just saying that because of number of slots for sticks? because you can get 4GB sticks i think, definately 2GB.
-Derek
-
- Posts: 14
- Joined: Wed Feb 16, 2005 4:01 pm
- Location: Naperville, IL, USA
Random Thought...
It seems that everyone has been concentrating on the limited file space available (with good reason)... With all the high performance CPU's (esp. dual-core) would Windows' built in HD compression utility be a viable solution? I'm not sure it would be possible to isolate the decompression/compression onto one core with Windows for max performance, but the sheer bandwidth might be enough to overcome any lag from its use... Any opinions on this matter? Could Linux do something like this (esp. if Windows can't)?
Thanks
BTGZ
Thanks
BTGZ
Or even better, use a fileserver connected by gig, silent and acceptble levels of space.Edward Ng wrote:Combine the solutions. Use the RAM card for OS/apps and use a laptop HDD completely muffled in an enclosure for storage. I guarantee you this is inaudible. At that level one should be more worried about coil whine or monitor hum/buzz.
-Ed
AtW
-
- Posts: 69
- Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2004 7:43 pm
- Location: Southern California
-
- Posts: 1608
- Joined: Tue Jan 04, 2005 4:02 pm
- Location: United States
I'd get it if it had an external PSU so that it wouldn't be stuck with JUST battery power. Also would like to see a BIOS software option as a way to choose to copy the data on the RAM drive to a secondary harddrive, especially in case the power goes out and you don't know when it will be coming back on.
You just backup the data to a harddrive and then if the power's out so long the battery backup doesn't make it, you still have the data on the harddisk and just copy it back over to the RAM when you get power back and boot back up without losing ALL YOUR EFFING WINDOWS SETTINGS AND DATA. Hello, how dumb is it to use a RAM drive as your primary OS drive/partition if you risk losing everything with a simple power outtage that lasts longer than the battery backup.
You just backup the data to a harddrive and then if the power's out so long the battery backup doesn't make it, you still have the data on the harddisk and just copy it back over to the RAM when you get power back and boot back up without losing ALL YOUR EFFING WINDOWS SETTINGS AND DATA. Hello, how dumb is it to use a RAM drive as your primary OS drive/partition if you risk losing everything with a simple power outtage that lasts longer than the battery backup.
i don't see what all the fuss is about, just install a few of http://www.emerybuilt.com/20kw.jpg in your basement
mmmmmmmm, one of those would be nice. Not only would you not lose your ram drive, but you could keep folding when all the other teams couldn't.i don't see what all the fuss is about, just install a few of http://www.emerybuilt.com/20kw.jpg in your basement
But is it silent?perplex wrote:i don't see what all the fuss is about, just install a few of http://www.emerybuilt.com/20kw.jpg in your basement
-
- Posts: 37
- Joined: Fri May 13, 2005 8:33 am
In my earlier post I mistakenly said this card maxed out @ 4GB due to what I read in the linked bit-tech.net post:
I took this to mean that the total was 4GB, and I was mistaken. As I said in my original post, however, this changes nothing for me because 4GB @ 320 dollars is probing the thermosphere of my price limit as it is. For those able to afford it, I hope you enjoy it.The add-in card currently supports up to 4GB of DDR1 memory, and we understand that it is possible to link two cards together for a RAM Disk with a RAID array. That should prove to be interesting, and we wonder what transfer speeds could be achieved with two of these cards together.
What about making them SATA II ? Why SATA only ? Is that hard to make SATA II ? Maybe u will tell this to them, but I'm sure they already know this aspect.The Instigator wrote:I spoke to a Giigabyte product manager and he said it could take 2GB sticks to make an 8GB drive, but its very pricey and hard to find. He also told me they are testing a lot of different RAM for compatibility and they are still expecting a release of around mid-july.
-
- Posts: 69
- Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2004 7:43 pm
- Location: Southern California
I specifically asked hom about SATII and PCEe, and he said they are working on it and it will be the next generation of the iRam. They are bringing the PCI/SATA to market now because the majority of users now dont have SATA II or PCIe.marius7 wrote:What about making them SATA II ? Why SATA only ? Is that hard to make SATA II ? Maybe u will tell this to them, but I'm sure they already know this aspect.The Instigator wrote:I spoke to a Giigabyte product manager and he said it could take 2GB sticks to make an 8GB drive, but its very pricey and hard to find. He also told me they are testing a lot of different RAM for compatibility and they are still expecting a release of around mid-july.
-
- Posts: 13
- Joined: Sat Apr 24, 2004 6:34 am
PCI Riser
Would an PCI riser work to expand 1 PCI slot?
Like this one: http://www.bebensee.de/shop/ssc007.jpg
Theres 1 to 3 risers too. But do these work with the +5v standby power(10W) , and if so how many cards can it keep refreshed?
And would you only have the max power to 1 slot(25W?) for all 2 or 3 slots? 3 cards with 4 dimms = 12 Dimms x Xwatts + battery charging = is 25W to little even for 2 cards?
Like this one: http://www.bebensee.de/shop/ssc007.jpg
Theres 1 to 3 risers too. But do these work with the +5v standby power(10W) , and if so how many cards can it keep refreshed?
And would you only have the max power to 1 slot(25W?) for all 2 or 3 slots? 3 cards with 4 dimms = 12 Dimms x Xwatts + battery charging = is 25W to little even for 2 cards?
-
- Posts: 1608
- Joined: Tue Jan 04, 2005 4:02 pm
- Location: United States
Did he mention how many lanes it would be capable of using? 1x, 4x, 16x?The Instigator wrote:I specifically asked hom about SATII and PCEe, and he said they are working on it and it will be the next generation of the iRam. They are bringing the PCI/SATA to market now because the majority of users now dont have SATA II or PCIe.marius7 wrote:What about making them SATA II ? Why SATA only ? Is that hard to make SATA II ? Maybe u will tell this to them, but I'm sure they already know this aspect.The Instigator wrote:I spoke to a Giigabyte product manager and he said it could take 2GB sticks to make an 8GB drive, but its very pricey and hard to find. He also told me they are testing a lot of different RAM for compatibility and they are still expecting a release of around mid-july.
I haven't really read up much on PCI-E, but I'd assume a 16x card would be backward compatible with a 1x or 4x slot, right? The bandwidth available would just be less?
-
- Posts: 69
- Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2004 7:43 pm
- Location: Southern California
-
- Posts: 1608
- Joined: Tue Jan 04, 2005 4:02 pm
- Location: United States