Now this is FAST!!!!
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ultim said:
The RAM drives act just like normal hard disks, the i-ram plugs into the PCI for power only and then has an SATA cable going from it to the mobo and then the mobo detects it as a 4GB drive. Then you can just RAID them together.
A friend just said that these could be better for upgrading older systems, cause if you had a cheep version that could hold a lot more ram, you’d get a bigger speed increase. And ram is considerably cheaper than a processor upgrade, and you don’t need fast ram because the speed of ram is wasted because it’s limited by the SATA transfer rate, but the access time is microseconds!
These days computers are just quick and you’re constantly shifting bottlenecks from hardware component to hardware component but HDDs have always been a bottleneck, with i-ram that’ll be a thing of the past, I cant wait for i-ram 2 to come out!
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It's a shame really that the ultra fast server SCSI drives are still so expensive otherwise that would be another option to speed up access/loading times!
To be honest, yes its a very nice idea and so long as they keep developing it, it has the potential to be nothing short of amazing. Speed wise though for the sake of £50 for the I-ram (considering US to Uk prices) then £250ish for 4 gig of ram you have a very fast tiny storage system. You also have issues with it not being very secure (a decent power cut could well flatten it). I love the idea but its not THAT useful at the moment.
As a suggestion to those looking it at - SATA2 drives x4 + port replicator so all the drives do hardware raid 0 = roughly similar transfer speeds (i.e limited by SATA bus) The i-ram 2 will beat it (300MB/sec max which could still be done with drives but would take around 5/6 drives and the seek time would be awful) but considering you could put say 4x 80GB drives in raid 0, have much more reliability (yes 1 drive failure = death but id still argue thats more reliable than this) and a decent amount of storage for roughly the same price I know where my money will likely go
Seriously considering this as a system upgrade once I have the cash - get an external housing for a sata raid backplane and go from there
The ram solution has the advantage of fast sustained transfer and non-existant seek, personally though id be more interested in faster sustained transfer times over a bigger amount of data as it would generally save more time/be faster overall.
As a suggestion to those looking it at - SATA2 drives x4 + port replicator so all the drives do hardware raid 0 = roughly similar transfer speeds (i.e limited by SATA bus) The i-ram 2 will beat it (300MB/sec max which could still be done with drives but would take around 5/6 drives and the seek time would be awful) but considering you could put say 4x 80GB drives in raid 0, have much more reliability (yes 1 drive failure = death but id still argue thats more reliable than this) and a decent amount of storage for roughly the same price I know where my money will likely go
Seriously considering this as a system upgrade once I have the cash - get an external housing for a sata raid backplane and go from there
The ram solution has the advantage of fast sustained transfer and non-existant seek, personally though id be more interested in faster sustained transfer times over a bigger amount of data as it would generally save more time/be faster overall.
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fullfat said:the ram drive thing is valid but how the hell it loads the bios that fast i have no idea, thats not even having the storage device in the equation
Is it just me that thinks the BIOS speed is normal? The monitor goes into standby for what I'd consider a reasonable amount of time, and then quickly shows the CPU and memory installed. It's quite possible a 'quick boot' option is on. I have boards with 'quick boot' that don't even show the memory/CPU/drive detect screen because the monitor can't get out of standby mode fast enough. The first thing you usually see in this case is the Windows startup logo.
My single Raptor boots in one scroll of the loading bar, as long as the windows drive is clean of any junk it's very quick. However, since getting my Audigy 4, the creative drivers have slowed down boot time by quite a bitCraig321 said:
I agree, a lot of the booting is happening with the monitor still on standby.mrochester said:
The I-Ram is limited by the SATA interface but what really makes it fast is the Access time which is almost zero
also you have to realise that some of the normal boot time is taken up by the BISO serching for the drive and the drive checking to see how many read heads and cylinders ect that it has, the ram drive doesn't have to do that.
Very interested in this for the future, its definitely a way to go and I prefer it to either having windows in the bios (bios's currently only have very limited write amounts, which with windows swap file is constantly being done) or on a usb 2 drive (4gb ones are just available I know but still pretty limiting and pretty expensive and again not sure if you would want a swap file on one)
I have heard of these in conjunction as a live hdd if you wish - ie small fast hdd loading into this Ram drive while you work ,so windows work sultra fast and then saves changes back to hdd when you shut down - however its good to see they have developed it further to speed up booting also just not sure about having my pc on permanently.
I have heard of these in conjunction as a live hdd if you wish - ie small fast hdd loading into this Ram drive while you work ,so windows work sultra fast and then saves changes back to hdd when you shut down - however its good to see they have developed it further to speed up booting also just not sure about having my pc on permanently.
I would have no problems putting my Windows install on a RAM drive or fast memorystick etc...
You can make a disk image every week or so and if it goes wrong you can restore a backup.
What strikes me as interesting is that even PC2100 sticks are fast enough for the I-RAM
You can make a disk image every week or so and if it goes wrong you can restore a backup.
What strikes me as interesting is that even PC2100 sticks are fast enough for the I-RAM
Once this tech gets around the 30/40GB mark it could well be most useful. I think the most handy use for it might be as a hard drive buffer - turn the 8MB into 8GB and use some of a second CPU core to work on actively buffering the right sort of data and it might well be a winner.
m3csl2004 said:problem is most pc2100 ram is like 128/256mb in capacity
2 of these in raid 0 would be fun to watch
Yeah i dont know why they'd want to look into DDR2 ram for the next version, they could just use DDR400 which would still be considerably faster then SATA2
also if they did use DDR2 it would stop being afordable as i checked DDR2 prices and they're extortionate!
what we need is about an 8Gb ramdrive running DDR400 ram and compatable with SATA2 because in the future a lot of people are going to have DDR400 ram left over and just lieing arround when AMD make the jump to DDR2 with socket MQ2, it just makes so much sence that they probably wont do it =/
There is another tye of RAM Drive by a company called HyperOS.
I dont think this is classed as a competitior seen as there webstie site is the only place ive found where you can buy one but here it is
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
HyperDrive IV
The Worlds fastest commercial Hard Disk Drive has arrived
Fits into a standard CDROM bay
PATA and SATA connectors
133MHz bus speed
Solid state technology
Takes up to 8 DDR1 Registered ECC memory sticks up to 2GB per stick.
Max capacity is therefore 16GB
External power connector so that is keeps data when PC is turned off
Battery backup connector so that is keeps data in the event of a power cut
UPS can be added to external power supply or to battery connectors for long power cuts
Auto backup to optional board mounted portable hard disk in the event of a power cut
Very Low power Sleep mode automatically activated when PC power is lost
Seek time is 60 microseconds completely Silent!
Delivery time: New orders 6 weeks approx
The HyperDrive 4 is quite simply a Hard Disk made out of DRAM. It therefore connects and performs like an impossibly fast Hard Disk.
Gramophone free design - no mechanics, pure silicon! So no head crashes!
The HyperDrive 4, is the future of the Hard Drive.
HyperOs 2006 Geek is designed to enable you to run multiple Windows systems from your hard disk or from the HyperDrive. HyperOs enables you to copy whole Windows systems from the one to the other with a drag and drop and backup whole Windows systems from the one to the other likewise.
I dont think this is classed as a competitior seen as there webstie site is the only place ive found where you can buy one but here it is
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
HyperDrive IV
The Worlds fastest commercial Hard Disk Drive has arrived
Fits into a standard CDROM bay
PATA and SATA connectors
133MHz bus speed
Solid state technology
Takes up to 8 DDR1 Registered ECC memory sticks up to 2GB per stick.
Max capacity is therefore 16GB
External power connector so that is keeps data when PC is turned off
Battery backup connector so that is keeps data in the event of a power cut
UPS can be added to external power supply or to battery connectors for long power cuts
Auto backup to optional board mounted portable hard disk in the event of a power cut
Very Low power Sleep mode automatically activated when PC power is lost
Seek time is 60 microseconds completely Silent!
Delivery time: New orders 6 weeks approx
The HyperDrive 4 is quite simply a Hard Disk made out of DRAM. It therefore connects and performs like an impossibly fast Hard Disk.
Gramophone free design - no mechanics, pure silicon! So no head crashes!
The HyperDrive 4, is the future of the Hard Drive.
HyperOs 2006 Geek is designed to enable you to run multiple Windows systems from your hard disk or from the HyperDrive. HyperOs enables you to copy whole Windows systems from the one to the other with a drag and drop and backup whole Windows systems from the one to the other likewise.