Gigabyte i-RAM Solid State Storage Device > Anyone Got One / Getting One?

harris1986

harris1986

harris1986

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Hi guys just seen on the oc website about the iram, just curious if anyone is thinking of getting one? anyone know how long the battery on the iram lasts? if i say installed windows onto it and had a sata hard drive for storage would it just boost the performance of windows or does it boost pc performance as a whole?
 
:eek:
OcUK expect to sell these ?!?!

I would put the money to something else to improve performance, you have to buy all the ram which is going to cost a lot.
It is blindingly fast but no worth it in my eyes.

MC_Bob
 
They're not fantastically useful unless you're after high benchmarking scores really.

For the money you're much better off with 150gb Raptors.
 
Already got one!

Got it from Canadian guy on XS (private sale) with memory and all for less than the price that OcUK are selling them at. The iRAM price here at Ocuk is good for the UK, but compared to USA or far east it is ridiculous.

You gotta be careful what sata controller you attach it to - will not work with my DFI CDR3200 motherboard, but works with my ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe but only on the ULI SATA ports, will not work on the Silicon Image ports. It is revision 1.3 and I am using OCZ value ram 1gb modules.

Plan to use it as a scratch file or as a benching OS.
 
Could be quite an interesting new toy to have BUT with it selling in the US for $123 .. i can't help but feel we are being stung badly once again in the UK :(
 
harris1986 said:
Hi guys just seen on the oc website about the iram, just curious if anyone is thinking of getting one? anyone know how long the battery on the iram lasts? if i say installed windows onto it and had a sata hard drive for storage would it just boost the performance of windows or does it boost pc performance as a whole?
Click to expand...

this device looks really interesting to me, i like the originality of it, even if it's dead expensive. Hats off to Gigabyte for implementing something different.

Seems slightly weird to me that it uses SATA though, isn't the PCI bus faster than that? or even the PCI-Express bus? I'm not sure. It just shocked me a bit that the fastest this could go was limited by the top speed of SATA.
 
Jimbo Mahoney said:
Review here:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=224&type=expert
Click to expand...
WH:eek:A those benchmarks! Now can someone else 'steal' the idea and improve it :D

stokefan said:
{snip}Seems slightly weird to me that it uses SATA though, isn't the PCI bus faster than that? or even the PCI-Express bus? I'm not sure. It just shocked me a bit that the fastest this could go was limited by the top speed of SATA.
Click to expand...
I think the whole idea behind this is to use it as a storage device like the Hard Disk. SATA makes it easier to implement.
 
Very nice!

The only problem is the nature of the memory means the safety of your data is always at question.

What i would like to do is store my OS/APPS on a hard-drive but load it into memory at boot time (or at will!) and have the ram updated from the hard-drive.

That way your data is secured on a drive but you get the benefits of all that massive speed.
 
stokefan said:
Seems slightly weird to me that it uses SATA though, isn't the PCI bus faster than that? or even the PCI-Express bus? I'm not sure. It just shocked me a bit that the fastest this could go was limited by the top speed of SATA.
Click to expand...

PCI bus is limited to 133MB/s. (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
 
Jimbo Mahoney said:
PCI bus is limited to 133MB/s. (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
Click to expand...

what about PCI-Express? What speed is that? Surely you could hook it up to that somehow instead of SATA?

Although I understand that the SATA connection just makes it easier so that Windows sees the RAM as a storage drive...
 
Hi there

Thanks for this USA pricing info, Gigabyte UK are about to get it, no way am I gonna sell their products when I can buy them from the USA even myself for less.
 
Thanks Gibbo. At least now there is more than the retailer whose iRAM was reviewed in CustomPC magazine selling this - they have it for £270!!!! It can be had for $115 in the states!
 
stokefan said:
what about PCI-Express? What speed is that? Surely you could hook it up to that somehow instead of SATA?

Although I understand that the SATA connection just makes it easier so that Windows sees the RAM as a storage drive...
Click to expand...

PCI is bandwidth limitted and not an exclusive channel, the iRAM is capable of operating at 133MiB/sec 100% of the time which would bottleneck the PCI bus when using other PCI devices. PCIe could solve the problem, but PCIe x1 and x4 are nowhere near as widespread as SATA, nor does everyone who has an x1 or x4 socket actually have access to it.

Shame this thing doesn't support SATA 3Gb/s, that really would make it worthwhile. 300MiB/s is greater throughput than system memory just a few years ago.
 
goreblast said:
Thanks Gibbo. At least now there is more than the retailer whose iRAM was reviewed in CustomPC magazine selling this - they have it for £270!!!! It can be had for $115 in the states!
Click to expand...

Hi there

Right were getting there, its down to £99 on our specials page and we shall try for better during the next couple of weeks.
 
Goreblast wrote...

Plan to use it as a scratch file or as a benching OS.
Click to expand...

Now, this might just be me, but can anybody explain the point of using this device to run a benchmark test, that at the end of the day will not reflect the actual day to day use of the machine?

Yeah, sure, you would get a blinding score on the Custom PC Image Benchmarks for instance, but what's the point?!

Is it just more hardware willy waving? ;)

What is the real use for one of these things? (And I'm not having a pop here, I'm genuinely interested as to what it was designed to do!)
 
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