Gigabyte announce RAM drive

[Johnny Bravo]

Straight from Bit-tech (http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/31/gigabyte_ramdisk/)

Sounds good with a few benchies for you graph lovers :D

Also possibility of RAID setup giving 8GB of space. HDD may have become somewhat less of a bottleneck in benchmarks and games alike!!!!!

[WeStSiDePLaYa]

Straight from Bit-tech (http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/31/gigabyte_ramdisk/)

Sounds good with a few benchies for you graph lovers :D

Also possibility of RAID setup giving 8GB of space. HDD may have become somewhat less of a bottleneck in benchmarks and games alike!!!!!


only thing is all info on it is lost after 16 hours without the pc being on. also you couldnt transfer to another pc without losing info, well you could, but the ram would still have power going to it. :eek:

[DudeMiester]

You can transfer it, the battery is on the card.

[WeStSiDePLaYa]

You can transfer it, the battery is on the card.
exactly what i am saying, there will be live volts going to the card as you transfer it, making it VERY easy for shorts.

[teqguy]

Westside, it's obvious that you have absolutely no concept of how a ramdrive works.

Most ramdrives are volatile because they're used strictly for caching and fast storage... not as primary drives.

For example, if you were encoding a video, you could shave off a significant amount of time by storing both the source and the output on the drive, because you're avoiding having to read and write data from a mechanical drive. Then, when it completes, you would drop it on a non-volatile storage device.

The only reason Gigabyte is including battery backup is to reduce the volatility so that it can be used as a semi-functional primary drive, which is a step up from the software and hardware based ramdrives that have been around for years.

It's absolutely not meant to allow you to transfer it.


Hopefully it won't cost as much as this one: www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm

Even if it is, though, it'd be worth it, considering the performance is tremendously better than that one.

[Puni Puni Poemy]

This is going to be Priced at 60 USD for the Card. And then whatever for the Ram depending on how much you want etc... It only supports PC1600 (DDR200) Which is very fast compared to Hard Drive speed.

Also in other reports from around the web, it states that this will be powered by the PCI slot, even when the computer is off. As long as its plugged in. Unplugged, Depending on how many sticks of ram you have, it could last between 12 and 16 hours.

Thats pretty good IMO. Also, since these are just seen as "hard drives" by the Controller, The ability for Raid is there. I dunno if this gigabyte model supports that, but I dont see why not.

and 4GB x2 Raid 0 arry of this, would be wicked wicked fast. And I would concider putting OS, Apps, and espically the Swap File on here.

I think this is a great Idea... espically for under 500$ for 4GB. :)

[13oost]

hehe

i did a product design on this back in april

http://paced.13oost.com

[teqguy]

It's definitely something to look forward to.

They've eliminated the volatility enough that people can actually start using these as primary drives with very low fault tolerance.

I would still recommend that people make periodical backups and store all of their important documents on both a traditional hard drive and a backup medium.


Although, the only files that actually need to be stored on a drive like this are the files required to boot Windows. If you're encoding or rendering a file, you would use this as temporary storage for the source and destination.

Other than that, though, you probably wouldn't see a significant increase in performance, considering access times on hard drives are low enough already.

[13oost]

great for pagefiles on large corporate servers, its a cheaper salution than to get a new server setup when you have already maxed out the ram slots, but not necessarily the capacity....

the only advantage i see to this on PCI is just lower latency, since the PCI bus is so limited

PCI-e should show quite an increase in pagefile speeds and decrease on server/computer strain during heavy operation

[Puni Puni Poemy]

No data transfer goes thru the PCI bus.... Its only powered by the PCI Bus. It hooks up to a SATA port on the Mobo via a SATA cable and acts just as a Hard Drive would. This is where the Potential Lies, because now we could accually See something max out the bandwidth

[frostedflakes]

Keep in mind that PC1600, as the name implies, has a maximum data transfer rate of 1,600MB/s. You won't see any increase in performance from a RAID0 array, as the SATA interface is maxed out with a single card.

[13oost]

:with: exactly.... honestly the only improvemnt is the latency

[teqguy]

Keep in mind that PC1600, as the name implies, has a maximum data transfer rate of 1,600MB/s. You won't see any increase in performance from a RAID0 array, as the SATA interface is maxed out with a single card.

Well, even if it's not SATA2, it's still a tremendous step up from the 60MB/s rate of all mechanical hard drives.

A RAID array would show an improvement, because you'd be looking at 300MB/s or 600MB/s, instead of 150MB/s or 300MB/s (depending on whether it's SATA or SATA2).

Hopefully with the next release it'll interface entirely through PCIe and support DDR2 memory up to at least 533Mhz.

They could even include an onboard RAID controller to manage multiple cards and a hard drive emulation controller so that it would be supported without drivers.

[13oost]

they need a PCI-e version, but imho the use of DDR is the best solution because its the main ram used in systems today, currently, and its cheap and easy to come by in the value sets...

[teqguy]

Gigabyte is known for equipping their motherboards with multiple types of DIMM slots so that backwards compatability is not an issue.

It wouldn't be hard to do the same with this.


Hybrid DDR and DDR2 slots are also a possibility if they could be interfaced correctly.

[perkam]

From a more fundemental pov, I dont think we need to give mobo manufacturers an excuse not to put sufficient features on a mobo.

Perkam

[Gogar]

Hmm two of these with 4 x cheap 1GB CL3 in RAID 0.. to create a 8GB 300MB/s system partition :) oh and 0,0ms access time.. Should cost around $700 for the ram and 2 boards.