Bring back the I-Ram

DireEmblem

DireEmblem

DireEmblem

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For those of you that dont know:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

Anyhow to the point, the performance of these is obscene, and beats most drives out today...

However this technology is >3years old and uses old DDR memory.

It was scrapped initialy due to the expense, and because of ddr is limited to 4gb in size.

Nowadays you can buy one for around £70 minus the memory, but my though is are there any of us around here that think we could engineer a ddr2/3 imterface to use faster/larger ram, and even then what about the interface?

ie could we get it to work with sata2 or the PCIE bus?

performance wise, upgrading this technology would easily beat any current drives out there, and as for reliability/lifespan, that depends on the battery life, which can be replaced...

Such a project for OCuk forum users i think is possibly unprecidented. the most I think I/people have done are to build custom water blocks...
 
qwerty321 said:
Sounds like hard work.
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this sound like an understatement to me, plus there are very few people who would actually be any use at all. this isn't the kind of project to gaffer tape together.

qwerty321 said:
plus ram has to have voltage ran though them all the time unless it wipes the data.
Click to expand...

this was the main floor, but i don't believe the I-Ram was used for anything like an OS or a storage drive, isn't the idea for people who need a fast temporary disc space, video encoders, cad people
 
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There already is something better than everything else.

A peep posted in this section but I can seem to get correct keywords to find it.

Its a PCI-E card with 640GB of RAM, it is faster in all aspects by a mile but the most important factor is how many I/O's it can do a second.

This was a while back and before PCI-E 2.0 BTW.

There was links to the write up and a Video(s).
 
Not sure as I ain't in there lol.

I'm 100% I commented on it and the site don't look right (but could have changed). :(

May be same thing just not linking to the Videos etc.
 
The architecture can be straight forward.

Check out Xilinx FPGAs. I recently looked into FPGAs and many of them have DDR/DDR2/3 interfaces and have core component for interfacing DDR1/2/3 based logic. If you're running through PCI-E then you'd need a driver to run the DMA whereas if you're running SATA you'd need to emulate the standard drive operations and have a chip to drive the SATA hardware interface itself.

Although it would be cheaper to buy a motherboard with the memory in it..
 
crazyDAJT said:
but i don't believe the I-Ram was used for anything like an OS or a storage drive, isn't the idea for people who need a fast temporary disc space, video encoders, cad people
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i used mine for xp32, kept an image on my other hard drive, which it could restore in about 8 seconds

so if it did run flat (the battery -which it never did) then it would take about 1 minute total to restore it -had to wait for the acronis cd to boot, etc


gigabyte were going to make the i-ram2, SATA2, DDR2, but it never came about... :(
 
TBH, that was the type of performance jump I was hoping for with the SSD over conventional hard drives etc, shame that the majority of manufacturers couldn't deliver.
 
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bledd. said:
i used mine for xp32, kept an image on my other hard drive, which it could restore in about 8 seconds

so if it did run flat (the battery -which it never did) then it would take about 1 minute total to restore it -had to wait for the acronis cd to boot, etc


gigabyte were going to make the i-ram2, SATA2, DDR2, but it never came about... :(
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What type of batteries did it use, some sort of watch battery?
 
I still have one of these (£60 import + cheap memory from auction site), bought it a few years ago.

It is very fast, I used to have XP Pro on it. Loading was very quick and windows was generally a lot snappier. I have Vista Business 32-bit now (won't fit) so I use it for my pagefile and general temporary files area (extracting RARs etc...), makes Vista a bit more pleasant.

The battery actually isn't required for day to day use (my one died and I have never replaced it). It is only required if you unplug the PC from the mains or turn the PSU switch off. It retains its memory even when shut down as there is always a little power going through the motherboard. The battery was block shaped, like those you get in some digital cameras.

Only problem with it is that it doesn't support AHCI (Intel chipset) so you need to set it to IDE or RAID mode.
 
I always thought the downside was the way it sat in a pci slot, taking up another slot for the ram. The sort of person who would go for one of these would probably already have a double height (or two) graphics card and a soundcard, not leaving much space.

They would have been better off making a tray that fits into a 5.1/4 bay, could hold more sticks (8?) and look like a normal drive. 16gb would be more than enough for an OS and pagefile, then use SSD for programs etc.
 
Steeps said:
I always thought the downside was the way it sat in a pci slot, taking up another slot for the ram. The sort of person who would go for one of these would probably already have a double height (or two) graphics card and a soundcard, not leaving much space.

They would have been better off making a tray that fits into a 5.1/4 bay, could hold more sticks (8?) and look like a normal drive. 16gb would be more than enough for an OS and pagefile, then use SSD for programs etc.
Click to expand...

Could've sworn that I have seen something like that reviewed somewhere :confused:
 
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