150MB/s SATA hard disk €60 available NOW!

kasintahan

Ok I lied a little.

The Gigabyte iRAM is costs around €60 (in the next week or two) but the extra DDR memory will cost you more (2GB 266 modules cost around €150 from most memory suppliers).

It can take 8GB of memory max.

Still, it benches at 130MB/s and that's only because SATA can't go faster (SATA 300 can but this is only 150 for now).

I'm buying one as soon as they're available.

http://cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=14213

kasintahan

Diss

What the hell are you talking about?

An ass load of ram does not equal a HD.

Most people don't need 8gig of extra ram.

zuma

Diss wrote:

What the hell are you talking about?

An ass load of ram does not equal a HD.

Most people don't need 8gig of extra ram.

Please read the article you ignorant shít!!!

That would be an excellent system of booting up computers in the future!!!

Wht cant this use a direct PCI-Express interface???

kasintahan

Diss wrote:

What the hell are you talking about?

An ass load of ram does not equal a HD.

Most people don't need 8gig of extra ram.

Did you even read the artical?

This is totally seperate to main memory.
This is a SATA hard disk as far as the BIOS and OS are concerned.
It just happens to use DDR and not spinning glass plates.

The urge to insult you further that you have yourself is strong with me.

seamus

For a quicker bootup though, would you be willing to spend €860 (€100 per GB RAM, min) on a HDD that's tiny and only 17MB/sec faster?

I'd prefer to keep my 45sec boot-up time, thanks.

It's a good step towards using solid-state memory for quick booting and faster access, but this wouldn't be worth it, even for gamers IMO.

kasintahan

zuma wrote:

Wht cant this use a direct PCI-Express interface???

The PCI interface is ONLY for power, nothing else.

If it were a PCI/PCI-e or PCI-X devices then it would require OS/driver or special motherboard support.

This uses the generic SATA port for all data.

Why they don't make it SATA 300 compatible I do not know.

kasintahan

seamus wrote:

For a quicker bootup though, would you be willing to spend €860 (€100 per GB RAM, min) on a HDD that's tiny and only 17MB/sec faster?

I'd prefer to keep my 45sec boot-up time, thanks.

It's a good step towards using solid-state memory for quick booting and faster access, but this wouldn't be worth it, even for gamers IMO.

RAM is cheaper than that (even PC3200 is €85 per gig, PC2700 is €150 for 2 gigs). Besides you don't need 8 gigs, 1.5/2GB is fine for XP, 4GB is comfortable.

I want a silent 24/7 server with 100% reliablilty and low power usage.
The hard disk has alwasy been the problem in my setup, with not enough speed to cope with the massive number of transactions.

Gamers would also appreciate not having to turn their PC's off, boot times would be console like (ie switch it on and there is windows).

jozi

This has come up before somewhere on boards.

Tbh i didnt have a clue what this was about either, partially cause im not 1 bit bothered to click that link.

From what i remember there where implications with it thou???

optiplexgx270

i think you may be expecting too much

esp. if you are going to buy cheap/slow RAM

Diss

Yeah i should of read the article.

Still spectacularly pointless. The only people I could see buying this is large companies who see this as "the next big thing", or people who will depressingly use this in normal conversation.

"So, my pc boots up in less than 20 seconds, Aren't you so hot for me right now"

DemonOfTheFall

It's not really spectacularly pointless.

People have been using software to make RAM drive partitions for years and years. This just does it in hardware, with no hassle/driver/application support issues.

I think it's pretty nifty. Pick up the card for 60 euro then find yourself and cheapo PC2100/2700/3200 that u can get your hands on.

For people who say lower power consumption, read up on just how much juice a stick of ram can suck down...

Adam_K

Looked around a bit and found an article with lots of real (not nessesarily) numbers.

The iRAM is getting close to maxing out the interface its using, SATA1 (150MB/s theoretical), and will get alot better with SATA2 + later revisions. Definetly something to keep an eye on, as the current bandwidth limit that the modules are limited to, on the actual device is currently DDR166, which would be ~ 1.3GB/s transfer rate.


FYI, the Battery that secures the data on the RAM lasts anywhere from 10-16 Hours, and im sure there will be larger sizes avail to buy, fairly cheaply when its released.

Also, according to Gigabyte, i-RAM also will be allowed to use two cards to operate the RAID 0 patterns. So RAID fans will be happy with this one.


Windows Boot UP:

iRAM

---

6.42s
Seagate 80GB 7200rpm 8MB Cache

---

13.17s



PCMark 04 tests


HDD Score:

iRAM

---

57,699
Hard-drive

---

4,122

XP Startup:

iRAM

---

102.193 MB/ s
Hard-drive

---

7.348 MB/s

Application Loading

iRAM

---

100.503 MB/s
Hard-drive

---

5.918 MB/s

File Copying

iRAM

---

118.981 MB/s
Hard-drive

---

31.152 MB/s

General HDD Usage

iRAM

---

90.620 MB/s
Hard-drive

---

4.915 MB/s


SiSoft Sandra 2005 Benchmarks:


Buffered Read:

iRAM

---

133 MB/s
Hard-drive

---

40 MB/s

Sequential Read:

iRAM

---

133 MB/s
Hard-drive

---

52 MB/s

Random Read:

iRAM

---

133 MB/s
Hard-drive

---

38 MB/s

Buffered Write:

iRAM

---

126 MB/s
Hard-drive

---

97 MB/s

Sequential Write:

iRAM

---

127 MB/s
Hard-drive

---

54 MB/s

Random Read:

iRAM

---

127 MB/s
Hard-drive

---

38 MB/s




Winbench 99 High-End Disk Benchmark

Overall:

iRAM

---

191,000 KB/s
Hard-drive

---

35,200 KB/s

AVS/Express 3.4:

iRAM

---

213,000 KB/s
Hard-drive

---

32,600 KB/s

FrontPage 98:

iRAM

---

409,000 KB/s
Hard-drive

---

282,000 KB/s

MicroStation SE:

iRAM

---

240,000 KB/s
Hard-drive

---

53,200 KB/s

PhotoShop 4.0:

iRAM

---

94,500 KB/s
Hard-drive

---

10,900 KB/s

Premiere 4.2:

iRAM

---

156,000 KB/s
Hard-drive

---

41,500 KB/s


Sound Forge 4.0:

iRAM

---

261,000 KB/s
Hard-drive

---

81,700 KB/s

Visual C++ 5.0:

iRAM

---

224,000 KB/s
Hard-drive

---

55,600 KB/s


So, basically, it completely flattens your average SATA Hard-drive (Seagate 80Gig 8MB 7200), the only thing which compared to it at all, was: 2* SCSI U320 3.5" RAID 0 Maxtor Atlas IVs (15Krpm 8MB cache). Even That was behind it by 17MB/s on the Drive index.

CuLT

Them's impressive speeds.

I'd love to have spare cash enough lying around to get something like that. (Bit disparate comparing the iRAM with a bog standard hard disk, should at least compare it to the WD Raptor or similar).

zuma

A good comprehensive review:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=zt_en&trurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.hkepc.com%2fhwdb%2firamdisk-gbt-1.htm

(!Translation!)

CuLT

zuma wrote:

A good comprehensive review:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=zt_en&trurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.hkepc.com%2fhwdb%2firamdisk-gbt-1.htm

(!Translation!)

"reports to click on crown of the population."

I love it!

zuma

A random access time of 0.1seconds!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

kasintahan

optiplexgx270 wrote:

i think you may be expecting too much

esp. if you are going to buy cheap/slow RAM

The slowest part of the equation is the SATA bus!

Do you know how much faster RAM is over a hard disk? It's huge!

mp3guy

switch it off.. .and bye bye data. And as far as the battery life goes, it really isn't worth it... how fast is EEPROM again?

mp3guy

oh wait.... flash would be faster... but its not at HD speed yet...

jozi

Windows Boot UP:

iRAM

---

6.42s
Seagate 80GB 7200rpm 8MB Cache

---

13.17s

Are the realistic boot times?
If so, how the f**k do i get anything near that.
I dont even get near that with a fresh windows install.

Jozi

SouperComputer

iRAM

---

6.42s

From hibernation MTL. HD is a bottleneck on bootup alright, but 6s is BS! The CPU still has work to do, DHCP requests, start services etc.

DemonOfTheFall

With a properly optimised setup using bootvis, and assuming that all your drivers and services were playing nice I can easily see that happening. On a fresh install of windows, all drivers loaded, bootvis optimised Im into windows a couple of seconds after first seeing the logo. Granted that's on a RAID 0 stripe of 2 decent 7200rpm drives, but theres not much of a performance drop in ditching the RAID (which I did recently, good riddance)

SouperComputer

i thought bootvis was pulled as it was making most boot times longer?

Dempsey

I rather see flash memory being developed as a replacement for winchester drives. Much better in the long run

Capt'n Midnight

SouperComputer wrote:

From hibernation MTL. HD is a bottleneck on bootup alright, but 6s is BS! The CPU still has work to do, DHCP requests, start services etc.

Not to mention waiting for all of the OS's timeouts.

Anyone who has ever used 98lite to replace the windows 98 Explorer.exe with the one from windows 95 knows all about timeouts and waiting. And lets not forget that windows 95 beta was even faster but they included delay loops to allow it to run on really old hardware. OT - can you replace the XP interface with something as responsive as 2000 ?

One application for this would be to use it as cheap RAM via the swap file, ie using RAM as Cache for the slower memory. You are counting on the random access (seek) time being way faster than miliseconds.

You'd have your supped up system memory running at DDR625 625MHz or whatever then 8GB of DDR266, and of course another swap file on a real HDD if you need even more memory.

Make a great upgrade for an old 486 with a pair of free PCI slots (one for the SATA controller too) And if you have more PCI slots you can have even more.


Probably best not to put the OS on drive 'cos risk of battery loss and besides in windows there is a setting to not unload system files from memory so you only take one hit on slow access. Probably best to backup the 8GB to HDD at least daily.

Here's an interesting one - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;274750&sd=tech
Microsoft SQL is restricted to 2GB or RAM unless you buy the enterprise version. But if your dB's are less than 8GB in size ....

Capt'n Midnight

Dempsey wrote:

I rather see flash memory being developed as a replacement for winchester drives. Much better in the long run

100,000 Write cycles - fine for Linux or maybe for a heavily tweaked Windows 98, for 98SE or later normal disk trashing and sneaky writes will wear out the flash. Maybe something based on BartPE but you'd be safer using a HDD for swap file.

Or mix the technologies - Flash for data and iRAM for swap / temp

Dempsey

But with development, the short comings of flash and iRAM could be improved beyond all capabilites of Winchester Drives

Capt'n Midnight

Dempsey wrote:

But with development, the short comings of flash and iRAM could be improved beyond all capabilites of Winchester Drives

And holographic crystal memory is the next big thing, because it's been the next big thing for the last three decades at least.

I reckon a HDD with two independent heads could speed up thing a lot, it would be up to the OS / drive to figure out how to use them, but one could be copying files and the other updating file index info, or if they were 180 degrees apart then you'd only have to wait half a turn to read the data.

There is still a lot of develpment in HDD's, the only thing at present that that beats them for storage/price is mad stuff like optical tape. You could mix and match, with standard storage hierachy of expensive / fast down to slow / cheap

For business machines or people word processing with an OS/Suite that isn't bloated you could get away with a 1 GB drive and choose the option to run from CD or whatever. You could look at a server with RAID0 across iWIN drives and gigabit cards, a diskless PC might be even faster than one with local drives..