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

These look like a great idea, but the price is too much of a put off at the moment.

As for not enough storage on the one "drive", why not have a Raid-0 array for 8Gig goodness ;) - would be rather nippy too :p



Lithium said:
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.
Click to expand...
Yeh that would be a good way of doing things. Personally I would take this idea one step futher so it only backs up onto a harddrive when you want it to.
Thus keeping the immensely fast boot times, (something I'd really like)
 
am getting soo tempted now :p but if i can't fit windows onto it then there really is no point :S load time of most games and apps isn't really that big of a issue as most load almost instantly!

I swear i have seen a vid of some guy loading windows onto it as it boots in like 3secs
anyone care to clarify?
 
A fresh install of Windows should easily fit on shouldn't it?

I'm sure when I did a fresh install recently and then ghosted an image in case I had another crash, it was only about 2.1GB before compression?

I'm still looking for a practical everyday use for this device.

How about Windows MCE? Or does this boot quickly anyway? I suppose it would do away with the hard drive noise on boot etc?

You'd still need a HD for recording etc though...
 
ofc i have a 160gb seagate that i could put to use for that :) i'd mainly want it for the quick boot time hate waiting :D also if i had that would i need ram in my normal ram slots on the motherboard? anyone know how long the iram's battery lasts?
 
Just a heads-up, that OcUK have slashed the prices of the i-RAM drive by £50. :eek:

Link. Scroll about halfway down, and you'll see them for £99.95 + P&P + VAT.
 
Last edited:
Windows will go on it fine. why wouldnt it? 4gb is plenty.

Why would you take out your system ram? think about how your pc functions. this is not a dimm slot for system ram.

Im tempted to get one for windows


Tom
 
If you had a big enough ram-drive there would be no need for having traditional system ram.

Traditional system ram is loaded up from data on the disk so that the data can be access quickly....well thats not needed if your reading from a ram disk :)

Also... these things would be EXTREMELY useful as a scratch disk for photoshop for example of even small-ish video editing.

Solid state disks like this are the future of computing
 
Pretty sure he is reffering to the fact you have completely missed the point he made in his post.

The idrive replaces the harddrive, not the system RAM. you will still need RAM for it to do what RAM always has done.
 
No but thats the point.... if you have solid state storage with fast access you wont need the traditional CPU/RAM/DISK ....

Im talking in general terms here not specifically about current implentations.

I full well know that with this being through SATA the bandwidth is minimal.....
 
Ok now I see what your getting at.

At the present state of afairs that isn't going to be possible, but I imagine it will be in the future.
Although I think keeping system RAM + storage RAM seperate would make it nice and simple to follow. beucase I doubt storage RAM would need to be as fast, whilst still delivering high performance. It would cost too much to have the whole thing as one very high performance drive, unless technology in this area comes on in leaps and bounds atleast.
 
Just to clarify on some points raised earlier in the thread, the PCI connector is only used to power the card. The data is handled via the SATA connector.
Why Gigabyte didn't use a SATA power connector and drive brackets to install it in a drive bay I'll never know. We are getting hard pushed for PCI slots with the latest dual GFX card installations.

The most practical use I can see for this device is to use it as the Virtual Memory drive for Windows (page file). That way when you have applications running that eat into the system RAM, you don't run into bottlenecks with the page file being accessed on the hard-disk. Can anyone test this configuration?
 
darkblade said:
Just to clarify on some points raised earlier in the thread, the PCI connector is only used to power the card. The data is handled via the SATA connector.
Why Gigabyte didn't use a SATA power connector and drive brackets to install it in a drive bay I'll never know. We are getting hard pushed for PCI slots with the latest dual GFX card installations.

The most practical use I can see for this device is to use it as the Virtual Memory drive for Windows (page file). That way when you have applications running that eat into the system RAM, you don't run into bottlenecks with the page file being accessed on the hard-disk. Can anyone test this configuration?
Click to expand...

TBH, gaming with 2Gb rarely uses that, infact I have my PG off. and if you do Photoshopping, you should have 4Gb ram....

This wont replace system ram, or not for the forseeable future, nothing can sustain 6.4Gb/s as PC3200 could as a I/O interface.

As for me, ill be getting one of the larger drives, 8gb + SATA 300, to really see if fly.

BF2, MS FS 2004 and Windows takes abit of space ;)

Conc
 
this will eb great when amd owners go to conroe/am2 we will have 2 gigs or more of ddr lieing around, ready to install windows on. i imagine windows woudl load in seconds
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom