Ram drives?

oggmonster · 30 Jun 2009 at 13:35

I know a while back Gigabyte were doing something called i-ram. Any ideas why its faded it (i prosume it has) from what ive read its really quick.
Anybody know if theres any plans for something similar? Also how do they compre to SSDs?

HazardO · 30 Jun 2009 at 16:30

It only supports 4G of DDR RAM, and relys on a battery to keep the data. I'd expect it to be much quicker than an SSD though. Google suggests you could get one for about £90 (without the DDR RAM).

Well Splattered · 30 Jun 2009 at 20:06

Slower than current SSD drives as SATA150
Board costs about £80
Memory costs about double that.
Unreliable
Battery only last a few hours

It was quick, several years ago. Now SSD drives are the daddy.

jimmy29 · 30 Jun 2009 at 20:46

Well Splattered said:
Slower than current SSD drives as SATA150

Try again.
As it is RAM based, you're talking nano second access times which is what makes the difference. Sure it will be held back massively by the SATA interface but any RAM disk will still knock the socks off any SSD.
A much better alternative to i-RAM though is simply to buy a lot of system memory and use a portion of it as a disk, DDR2 is so cheap these days.

Well Splattered · 30 Jun 2009 at 21:11

jimmy29 said:
Try again.

jimmy29 said:
As it is RAM based, you're talking nano second access times which is what makes the difference. Sure it will be held back massively by the SATA interface but any RAM disk will still knock the socks off any SSD.
A much better alternative to i-RAM though is simply to buy a lot of system memory and use a portion of it as a disk, DDR2 is so cheap these days.

ok, heres some evidence that they are slower then SSD's.

here's the original article/review.

[/QUOTE]

Plus, actually having owned two IRAM modules which I used in RAID0 and as seperate drives. I am in a good position to advise. Here is my own benchmark of IRAM against RAMdisk.

Now please show me some evidence on where they are quicker.

miniyazz · 30 Jun 2009 at 23:19

Well Splattered said:
*snip*

I don't know enough about either to make a valid conclusion, but would like to point out that system boot times are fairly irrelevant since it has to load the OS onto RamDisk or whatever during boot..

Well Splattered · 1 Jul 2009 at 18:20

miniyazz said:
I don't know enough about either to make a valid conclusion, but would like to point out that system boot times are fairly irrelevant since it has to load the OS onto RamDisk or whatever during boot..

Thats true of a RAMdisk, but not true for the OP question regarding DDR driven devices such as the Gigabyte I-RAM.

WS