Where's my solid state Hdd?

cavemanoc

cavemanoc

cavemanoc

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Well, I see that they are now selling SD cards at 4Gb for around $80 in the states. I always thought that if you could get it cheaply enough then solid state hdd's for the boot partition would be the way to go. The hardware is definitely there, so why is no-one using it yet?

I know it seems extreme to ask $100 for a 5Gb drive when you can get 300Gb for the same amount, but honestly, I'd happily pay it if it meant lightning fast OS boot times, heck - I'd even spring for two, raid 'em and use 'em for games!

Now I know that SD cards are severely limited in speed, but the principal is there. If the mobo manufacturers provided an interface capable of decent transfer speeds, the 'micro drives' would follow. This has been around in enterprise for years, isn't it time we shared in the goodness?

What's holding the tech back, and is there any way we can ghetto up a solution?
 
Don't think he's talking about Flash memory, but he may be quoting prices of flash memory without realising it (maybe)...

In any case, what your saying isn't quite the case

The main cause for a slow bootup isn't the speed of your hard drive, although obviously does play a part its not that big a deal...

1. Switch on computer

2. POST

3. SATA bios

5. Detect hardware and activate it all

6. Load windows

7. Detct more hardware

Solid state drive will only help loading windows, it won't doi anything at all for the rest of it.

It won't even help that much, since hardware is being detected while windows loads and nonsense like that.

There was an article on this on overclockers.com a few months ago and they pretty much came out with the same as above.
 
Gigabyte I-Ram drive will be closest to what your looking for.

Around £60 for the card (PCI card, only uses PCI to draw power) and takes up to 4x1 gig DDR sticks so around £250ish for the ram would get you a 4gig lightening drive with no seek times, very fast boot, silent and very low power. But for the sake of that id personally build a 4 drive raid 0 - the seek wouldnt be anywhere near as good but it would happily max sata bus in the same way as the I-Ram.

The I-Ram 2 on a SATA-2 interface (the original plugs into SATA) would take around 4/5/6 drives to beat and the seek would start to get a bit silly so might be worth another look once it comes out :)
 
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SD/CF cards are Flash memory which is slow, unreliable and prone to dying which is why it is cheap compared to DDR/DDR2

What might interest you is something like the Gigabyte I-Ram, I think I saw reviews of it on Anandtech and Techspot.

Booting isn't really faster though as most of the time is spent initializing stuff and BIOS related which isn't limited by disk speed.

Also there are the interface limitations.
 
Think u missed a refresh there Dutchy ;) :p

To backup the I-Ram a windows restart is around 6 seconds (was a video of it) the blue bar on the windows splash screen flickers and instantly onto login screen.
Im still with 4x hitachi drives in raid 0. With the I-Ram you have the problem of power loss = no data in about 16hrs so I class that as less reliable than the drives and the drives could be used for lots more stuff :)
 
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Mercutio said:
Think u missed a refresh there Dutchy ;) :p

To backup the I-Ram a windows restart is around 6 seconds (was a video of it) the blue bar on the windows splash screen flickers and instantly onto login screen.
Im still with 4x hitachi drives in raid 0. With the I-Ram you have the problem of power loss = no data in about 16hrs so I class that as less reliable than the drives and the drives could be used for lots more stuff :)
Click to expand...

Do OcUk stock the I-RAM?
 
I have been looking at IRAM, It uses DDR memory which isn't that cheap but cheaper than DDR2 and still very fast. 4gb is probably just big enough.

When I upgrade to new memory I might buy 1 and stick this in.
 
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Mercutio said:
Think u missed a refresh there Dutchy ;) :p

To backup the I-Ram a windows restart is around 6 seconds (was a video of it) the blue bar on the windows splash screen flickers and instantly onto login screen.
Im still with 4x hitachi drives in raid 0. With the I-Ram you have the problem of power loss = no data in about 16hrs so I class that as less reliable than the drives and the drives could be used for lots more stuff :)
Click to expand...
Anandtech's test system boots in 9.12 seconds vs 14.06 seconds of one raptor.

The 6 second video was prolly optimiesd to boot as fast as possible with no DVD drive and no firewall/antivirus etc.... and possible speeded up video.


And boot time on this review is also close to a normal harddisk:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/gigabyte-iram/index.x?pg=3
 
Yep - The I-Ram is exactly what I was talking about - I can't believe they have actually released it to consumers :D I certainly wouldn't buy one as it stands now, but hopefully the fact that they've made one, will mean improved versions in the future - I would definitely take one based on the PCI-e slot architecture, now that more mobo's are available with dual and quad 16x lanes, the future is bright!

(And no - I don't care about drivers - if they could sort me one of those, on a 16x lane, with about 10Gb to run all my games off... :eek: )
 
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