Topic: Reinventing the Ramdisk.

[Nemesis]

Gigabyte reinvents RAMdisk

i-RAM is a PCI card containing four DIMM slots ready for up to 4GB of 200, 266, 333 or 400MHz DDR SDRAM. To the host PC, however, it registers as a 1.5Gbps Serial ATA hard drive. The storage connects to the host system via its own SATA cable - the PCI bus is used for power. The board contains a Xilinx Spartan Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip that converts Serial ATA instructions into memory read and write requests, and vice versa.

The card also has a 1700mAh rechargeable battery on board to power the memory when the host system is turned off. Gigabyte said the card's own power source will last for 10-16 hours. After that, of course, the memory is wiped.

I wonder about the performance increase of having your swap file on this drive?

[E_Look]

Maybe only with that fast, but expensive OC memory?

[Nemesis]

Maybe only with that fast, but expensive OC memory?

Considering the relative speed of memory vs hard disk I think that even with DDR200 it could swamp the SATA bus. Even slow memory is more than 100 times faster than a hard drive.

[Sirgod]

I remember Years ago, wanting something like this, Just to fast load SFC and the like. It looks like my dream might be a reality.

Stephen

[Javora]

I wonder about the performance increase of having your swap file on this drive?

Why stop there, you could move the entire operating system on to something like that.  It may take a bit of a storage increase but it should work.  What they should do is tie that product to a flash memory of the same size and have the flash memory keep a mirror image of everything that is stored on to the Ramdisk.  That would remove the memory loss issue entirely.

[Nemesis]

I wonder about the performance increase of having your swap file on this drive?

Why stop there, you could move the entire operating system on to something like that.  It may take a bit of a storage increase but it should work.  What they should do is tie that product to a flash memory of the same size and have the flash memory keep a mirror image of everything that is stored on to the Ramdisk.  That would remove the memory loss issue entirely.

Cost.   Memory prices are not going down as fast as OS bloat is going up and I have 3 computers.  I might try such a unit in my gaming computer.  I could justify upgrading my other 2 machines to 1 gb each and using their current memory to put 1 gb on the board for a swap file.   

Besides which I am not yet good enough with Linux to be sure I could keep everything backed up onto the real hard drive and current.  For the windows gaming machine I am sure I could handle it but not for the Linux systems.  I just don't have that level of Linux expertise ... yet.

[Javora]

Cost.   Memory prices are not going down as fast as OS bloat is going up and I have 3 computers.  I might try such a unit in my gaming computer.  I could justify upgrading my other 2 machines to 1 gb each and using their current memory to put 1 gb on the board for a swap file.   

Naw, not really.  Heck take a look at Newegg's prices on 1Gb Flash memory sticks, I saw one for $54USD (after $15USD mail-in rebate).  A year ago I paid that much for my 256Mb Flash drive.  Anybody that is willing to spend as much as $500USD for this product and the Ram to go with it IMHO won't mind an extra $200USD for a flash memory on-board backup.  And I don't see the cost of 2Gb of flash memory stuck on the end of a PCB costing as much as a two USB operated memory sticks sitting on a store shelf.  I see no reason to for Gigabyte not to offer something like this as a high-end option model.

To me the real question for this product is why??!?  The real bottleneck is at the CPU not the hard drive anyway.  In fact this was stated as much on the November 2005 issue of Maximum PC on page 103 (I was thinking about this thread and happened upon this information tonight while reading on my lunch break).  At least for high-end gaming and I suspect that to be the case for other software demands as well.  If someone needed a fail safe I guess this might fit the bill although I think on this issue the money can be better spent on a mirrored Raid drives.

[Nemesis]

To me the real question for this product is why??!?  The real bottleneck is at the CPU not the hard drive anyway.  In fact this was stated as much on the November 2005 issue of Maximum PC on page 103 (I was thinking about this thread and happened upon this information tonight while reading on my lunch break).  At least for high-end gaming and I suspect that to be the case for other software demands as well.  If someone needed a fail safe I guess this might fit the bill although I think on this issue the money can be better spent on a mirrored Raid drives.

It really depends on your applications.  Some will load everything into memory and run quickly.  Others try to limit memory use regardless of what is available and constantly load from and save to the hard drive.   Windows itself has a nasty habit of accessing the swap file even when memory usage is only the OS sitting there doing nothing.  Boost HD performance for programs that insist on accessing it constantly and your performance will increase.

One example.  SETI @ Home.  On one system I had to swap out the HD for an older slower unit.  SETI processing took 50% longer.  I was thoroughly disgusted and bought a HD that was even faster than the original that was swapped out, performance increased by 10% over the prior peak speed.  SETI at home is not memory intensive at all but it does read and write to the HD quite frequently.  SETI on one of these ramdisks should speed up noticeably.

If I get one I think that I would try it with SETI just to calibrate the performance boost.

1/ SETI only on the RAMDisk.
2/ Swap file only on the RAMDisk.
3/ Both on the RAMDisk.

I'll just have to wait until the hit the local market.

Here is another related device. 

CompactFlash IDE adapter

What you get

My review CF-IDE came from VME in bubble-wrap, without so much as a page of documentation. Fair enough; if you're ordering one of these things, you're expected to know how to plug in an IDE device.

If you were wondering whether CompactFlash cards really could work as plain old IDE devices, this adapter ought to put your doubts to rest. The thing's just, essentially, a pin converter. 40 pin IDE connector on one side, standard pushbutton-eject CompactFlash socket on the other, power connector hanging off on a wire. It doesn't even have an activity light.

Install the OS on one of these, put the swap and temps on the i-Ram board.  Minimum boot time, maximum perforamance.