Gigabyte i-RAM: RAM Based Hard Drive
I had seen Gigabyte’s i-RAM when it was displayed at Computex Taiwan last year and now Gigabyte has started supplying it North American consumers. i-RAM is a PCI card that has four slots for DDR SDRAM memory sticks and can be used as a hard drive once connected to the motherboard via a SATA cable. The gain with i-RAM is incredible speed compared to any traditional hard drive or even your WD Raptor hard drive. Since it is seen as a normal Serial-ATA hard drive to your motherboard’s BIOS, you can actually RAID two or more of them. There are, however, several drawbacks. The RAM slots are tilted so they don’t interfere with nearby expansion cards and therefore the i-RAM won’t work with certain DDR sticks with heatspreaders. Also, i-RAM keeps the memory “alive” on each DDR slot with the use of an onboard battery, which can only power four sticks of RAM for around ten hours. This means you shouldn’t really store vital information on it. Another drawback is that you are limited to four slots. Also it is $150 USD only for the card, you still need to provide your own memory. If you are looking to make that speed demon machine, it might be worth taking a look at. Some of the benchmarks are unbelievable.
While tight DIMM spacing limits compatibility with thicker heat spreaders, it’s not a major concern, because it’s unlikely you’ll want to waste high-end memory on the i-RAM. You see, the i-RAM’s Serial ATA controller is limited to 150MB/s transfer rates, creating a bottleneck that will constrain performance long before memory speeds or latencies enter the picture. In fact, even DDR200 memory has ample bandwidth to saturate the i-RAM’s Serial ATA interface.
But does that mean you only get 4gb of storage, like in the picture, or however much you can afford? You can’t do very much with just 4gb, and bigger memory that that costs loads.
I’m fairly sure it’s limited to 4GB although there have been some 2GB sticks but they are far too rare. A big downside is cost, a 4GB set like in that pic is $150 for the card + 4 x ~100(1GB sticks), which is more than $500. It is rather crazy, maybe the price will go down in the future or it will be bundled with some really cheap (but decent) RAM.
That’s a great thing for even a GIG of RAM, instead of using a USB stick. Imagine putting your temp (OS and Internet) directories in that drive. You can put your Photoshop Undo directories anc all the cache in your computer.
I’m planning a test with this kind of configuration but using an USB stick instead. I need increased performance in my laptop (Sony Vaio S2XP).
This is totally useless, and a big waste of money. You can use a ramdisk which is available on pretty much all platforms. The BUS connecting the onboard memory is orders of magnitude faster than an SATA bus.
Titanas,
USB 2.0 bandwidth is limited to 480Mbit/s or 60Mb/s. Your laptop hard drive is probably Ultra/ATA 133 which has a bandwidth of 133Mb/s. Discounting seek times (which may or may not be faster for your USB stick…but chances are they won’t matter since HD seek times are on the order of 5 milliseconds these days), you aren’t going to get any improvement from running on a USB stick.
And Christos is right - CPU/memory busses are on the order of 10,000Mb/s for newer models (Athlon 64 FX hits 12800) while SATA runs at 150Mb/s. And doesn’t really even reach that usually. That being said, I think you’d only ever use one of these things in a computer where you can afford to run the i-RAM as your OS HD and use your main memory for as application memory. This isn’t the kind of thing the casual user is probably going to buy… at least not for a long long time.
Using different busses (USB, Hard drive) won’t increase performance? Instead of reading/writing to the HD writing would be done in the USB disk.
I’ve been wondering what can be the use of such small yet fast storage. Maybe it’ll be a good place to use as a secodary cache, for example temp installation files?
Titanas,
It won’t increase performance because instead of writing to the USB drive you could be writing to the HD, which is faster than the USB drive.
Titanas,
Don’t put your temp file on the USB flash stick.
1st- you will burn your flash memory. The flash memory only supports a very limited number of writes (depending on the chip quality it can go up to 25 000 or 100 000 writes).
2nd - as the others have pointed out, your hd is probably faster than the flash memory on the USB stick.
If you’re on a laptop that means your hd is painfully slow. That is, for power consumption reasons + heat dissipation constraints, the hd in a laptop runs at 4200 rpm or 5400 rpm at best. Compared with 7500 rpm on a desktop hd, that’s at least 30% slower.
Instead you could get a ramdisk driver and set up a drive for your temp, teporary internet files, ie history, etc.
See http://users.compaqnet.be/cn021945/RAMDisk/ramdriv.htm, the free one should be enough for basic needs.
The speed of your IE with your history and temporary IE files on it will double easily.
Wondering if this is necessary for such a thing. If you can allocate your hard drive for RAM and have a fast operating HD with say 15,000RPM what need is there to purchase the Gigabyte iRAM? If you go into system properties=>Advance=>Performance:Setting=>Advanced:virtual memory:change=>custom size to increase your RAM.
I am thinking about doing this with an fast external hard drive for my laptop through my firewire connection or changing out the internal HD and use an external for most of my programs.
Of course, I wonder if there will be noticable difference in hosting and serving say “Battlefield 2″ or other top of the line PC games through the internet or wireless connection in either scenerio. Is the iRAM more efficient to use rather than devoting one of the fastest hard drives on the market? Of course you should be able to match speeds with the processor as it works together.
Just a little ignorant (ok, hate to admit it but, well, maybe a lot ignorant)
The I-RAM is MUCH MORE faster than any 15k RPM harddrive.
People need to be careful about mixing bits & Bytes. I’ll use a capital B whenever I mean Bytes. The key to access speed is how close the storage is to the CPU. Every step adds latency, and distance always throttles bandwidth.
Obviously, closest to the CPU is your Level 1, and Level 2 cache. Next comes system RAM. DDR400 = PC3200. That’s 3200mbps, or twice that with a dual channel controller. DDR2 RAM is faster, but adds a lot of latency — pretty much a wash. On Intel chips, this data must also pass through the FSB channel, which runs at the same speed as the RAM.
Next in line is your AGP or PCI-Express channel. Each PCI-E 1x channel is about 2400mbps. A 4x slot could handle 10Gbps ethernet. Your 16x video slot is nothing short of amazing. These channels are on the motherboard chipset, so they also pass through the bridge to the CPU — either the AMD HyperTransport channel, or the Intel FSB (as does everything below this).
Next comes your IDE channel. Modern parallel ATA channels run at 100MB/s or 133MB/s. Note that we’ve switched from megabits/s to MegaBytes/s. Your typical HD can read 30-50MB/s. You can RAID them to get more throughput (provided you put each drive on a separate channel), but the latency is not increased by RAID. HD latency is a function of spin rate and head seek time.
Your Serial ATA channels can be either 150MB/s, or 300MB/s for SATA2. A 10k rpm Raptor can hit 70MB/s, so it doesn’t come close to saturating the SATA channel. The real value in the Raptor is low latency.
Next down the line is your high speed serial I/O, such as USB2, FireWire, or USB1. USB2=480mbps and Firewire=400mbps. That bits again, we we’re talking maybe 50MB/s max theoretical (30MB/s realistic). Gigabit Ethernet is faster. You can actually get 60-70MB/s transfer over the 1000mbps theoretical Gigabit port. On all of these, remember that the bandwidth is shared among all devices on the bus.
Anything on your PCI bus is slower than the above, and also shares bandwidth with all other PCI cards.
The Gigabyte i-RAM attaches to your 150MB/s SATA1 channel. It can actually transfer 135MB/s (~1000mbps). So it is limited by the SATA channel, and is at least 3-6x slower than system RAM. It is also at least 2x faster than a Raptor in bandwidth, and about 1000x faster in latency. You could double the speed and size by using RAID0.
As for what to use it for, the answer is to use it’s major strength: low latency. I plan to use mine (on order) in a local SQL server that I use for development. Obviously, the first thing to do is to max out the system RAM. But since this is a desktop motherboard (not a server motherboard) it holds only 4MB RAM, of which Windows will only let you use 2 or 3Gb. My i-RAM will be used to hold the indexes to database tables. These are small enough to fit, and will benefit from the zero seek time.
The i-RAM could be a better product. It really needs SATA2. It could also take 8GB RAM, fit in a 5.25 drive bay, and allow ECS memory. But all those things would increase the price. In fact, you can get all those things in other products for about $700. No thanks.
The real downside to the i-RAM is the cost, and that you cannot trust it. Your HD does CRC checking when reading sectors. The i-RAM does not, and DDR RAM is subject to soft errors. Also, a day-long power outage (unlikely as that is) will lose all your data. So you *cannot* simply use it to store a database. I plan to use mine for files that can be rebuilt on-the-fly from HD files.
Clearly, the i-RAM is not a product for everyone. A better product would be a 4GB caching SATA2 controller that would go in a PCI-express slot. Anyone know where to get one??
Guy Gordon: Have you considered starting a blog of your own? Blogger.com or Wordpress.com are great places to start.
Stammy: interesting and helpful bit, thanks
It was kinda long-winded, huh?
Very cool! Thanks for the story!
this will be perfect for specialized purposes. When you need ram disk like speed with harddisk like permanence. I’m going to use this for my animation program. I used to use a ram disk, but occassional system freezes would wipe out hours of stop motion work.
Competitors ?
-
Has anybody seen simiar or better or cheaper solutions
form other companies / competitors ?
-
Maybe has somebody found an adaption on
SATA-II Controller with longer life batteries ?
-
Or even better:
Has anybody come accross an internal
PCI FlashDisk with 2..4 GB Flash Ram ?
Those were popular some years ago and they do
not need batteries.
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Many thanks in advance for info
Gerald
Fast HardDisk vs. Fast CPU and large Memory
-
[...]
I agree that fast HardDisks are sometimes more
important than fast CPU or huge Memory.
-
Without buying a RamDisk (like the HDD-RAM by Gigabyte)
there are 2 possible solutions and those worked fine for me:
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Solution 1:
Suppose you have Win2000 or higher and you have 2 or more
HDDs in your Computer and you do not need to access the
HDDs with an older Windows Version or with Linux resp.
In this case you may upgrade both disks to “Dynamic Disks”
and than create a striped Volume of 16 or 32 GByte spanned
ober both disks. This “Partition” or Volume will work
almost twice as fast as the Harddisks do - but do not
compress this Volume and try to find out wheather NTFS or wheather FAT32 result in better speed.
On this Volume you can place the Temp-Directory
and the Temp-Internet-Files Directory and the Pagefile.
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Solution 2:
Buy a cheap ATA-RAID controller and refurbish some old
30..40 GB HardDisks with the free program “DRevitalize”.
If your power suppy allows it then you might use up to 4 HDDs in Striped Mode - they will work like a single
ultra-fast HDD.
Create one Patition for the Pagefile and create another Partition for the Temp-Files.
You might want to add some coolers…
-
General:
While CPU went from 100MHZ up to 4000MHZ the Windows System
Performance did hardly double …
WinNT has been optimized for 96 MB Memory and modern
Operating Systems say that they have been built on
NT-Technology …
They seem to use huge Memory Areas for the caching
of hundreds of files - while on the other hand they swap precious Memory to the pagefile.
So the modern “perpetuum swappible” Operating Systems keep performing quite poorly.
But when you supply fast HDD-Space for the Pagefile
- rather then adding memory or increasing CPU speed -
then the modern Operating Systems perform quite well.
-
regards, Gerald
PS:
I cannot prove all this - this is nothing more than my
subjective experience …
Following up my own post, I received my Gigabyte iRam back in May. I populated it with four sticks of 512Gb DDR 266, creating a 2Gb iRam drive.
I installed the board in my DFI Lanparty NF3 machine, and found that Windows crashed hard when I tried to create a partition.. I tried it in my DFI Lanparty NF4 machine. Same result. I tried it in my MSI Neo-4 NF4 machine. Same result on the Nvidia NF4 SATA ports, but it worked on the Silicon Image Raid-5 SATA ports. Hmmmm. I formatted a drive, copied files to it, and verified them — it worked fine. Then I moved the cable back to the Nvidia SATA port, and it corrupted the files.
I looked in the (slim) manual, and found a list of validated controlers. No Nvidia SATA controler is listed. They’re not supported. This is a serious shortcoming from Gigabyte. On seven computers I have only one non-Nvidia SATA port, and it’s not on my SQL server where I wanted to test the iRam. This basically made the iRam useless to me, and I dropped the project.
Maybe I’ll try again in the future, if Gigabyte improves their product. I was hoping for better.
See this:
HyperDrive IV
Fits into a standard CDROM bay
PATA and SATA connectors
133MHz bus speed
8GB (max) HyperDrive IV £399 (+ PP and VAT) $698.25 (+ PP and VAT)
16GB (max) HyperDrive IV £599 (+ PP and VAT) $1048.25 (+ PP and VAT)
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/products.htm#hyperosHDIIproduct
i want to run 2 4GB I-RAM in RAID 0. i bought the 1X pci-e SIBA with silicone image 3132 and the thing works great with 150 mb/s transfer rate (sandra). now this is bottle neck. i bought the 8X areca 1210 pci-e. the two 74 gb raptors that i have are great with it. but when i connect the i-RAM’s the card sees them but it can’t create raid volume because the S.M.A.R.T. feature is kikin in (explaned by the areca team) and the card refuses to create the array. is there any card on this world (pci-e) that can make this combination possible. the fastest storage devices in RAID 0 with an 8X PCI-E RAID controller. or does anybody know a forum that this matter can be discussed?
thanks
dssconsumer,
You don’t need to Raid0 the two iRam boards. I doubt that “striping” two ram drives will increase their speed any. Instead, you could try setting them up as Just a Bunch of Disks.
Guy Gordon, yes sir i do need to strip them sir! the need for speed never ends sir! now the 150 mb/s rate (sandra) is the theoretical and practical limit of the 1X pci-e channel. one i-ram only gives 134 mb/s rate (sandra) and there is a difference between 134 and 150. only the limitation of the 1X slot allows 150 mb/s transfer. my point is that if there is a controller that is for example 4X and is installed in the 4X pci-e or 16X pci-e slot than the expected rate will be the limitation of the sata buses of the two i-rams (stripped), or 2X134=268 mb/s. so is there a controller on this earth that can run the two i-ram’s in raid 0 installed in the 4X pci-e slot.
Guy Gordon-
Computer RAM is, in fact, measured in MB/s not Mb/s. Would it make much sense to have the PCI-E bus run over 10x faster than the system RAM? What good would it be to transfer data 10x faster than receiving it?
So PC3200 RAM has a theoretical bandwidth of 3200MB/s (3.2GB/s) or 25,600Mb/s (25.6Gb/s). The number after the ‘PC’ tells bandwidth in MB/s. This makes more sense if the PCI-E x16 can do about 38,00Mb/s which translates to 4,800MB/s.
This further increases the gap between HDs and RAM. There is a much bigger difference between 3,200 MB/s RAM and 150 MB/s HDs.
I just needed to clarify your clarification.
allowing for a maximum storage capacity of 16 GB but remember this is ust the start..
remember cd-rom, well then came dvd-rom and now bruray and discs with 1000 GiB capcity etc (and lots more) so its just a question of time before the ram-hd’s will be standard or even better, something new.. even better :P
ciao
Hi. I have two iRAMs and I love them. They are perfect for my scratch disks and increase the speed of my workfloy by 4 times or more. I tried hooking them up in RAID0 on my Asus p5k motherboard and with a 3ware 9650se RAID controller, and neither would recognize the disks. I know people have done this, but I cant find any info. Can you recommend a controller card that would work for this? The extra little bit of speed is worth it to me.
Thanks,
Matt