Gigabyte's i-RAM review at anandtech

**rushnrockt** · 07-25-2005, 05:13 PM

Yes, I know there are two threads on this topic, but since I helped originate the threads and they are now buried, I am starting a new thread.

Here is the linky
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480

For the lazy people out there, i-RAM is Gigabyte's gadget that plugs into PCI slot for power and uses SATA-150 pretending to be a hard drive while in reality using 4 sticks of RAM for up to 4 Gigabytes of memory.

Summary:
- expensive
- it IS faster in just about everything (<10 second boot for fresh unoptimized windows install)
- it is not dramatically faster for the most part
- limited size (4GB)
- still some bugs do work out in the whole execution
- very limited numbers for now (1000), but apparently another iteration is coming up with more memory slots.

**TimmyM** · 07-25-2005, 05:58 PM

Interesting. I use to have something simular to this years ago. It wasn't used for storage, even though I made a ramdisk out of part of it. It was mostly use for system ram. I had four of them, each one held 4 MEGS of edo ram. I had a 286 -12 with 16megs of ram running windows 3.1. Pretty cool for a 286.

I could see how this could be interesting for a car-puter. Really need to keep up with the backups, I would be afraid that battery would run down and lose everything.

**0l33l** · 07-25-2005, 06:11 PM

This looks awesome! I'm guessing that the 10 second boot time is w/o POST. Someone would have to write a program that would automatically backup the ramdisk everytime the car is turned on. I think that a 1gb ramdisk would work for almost everyone.

**rushnrockt** · 07-25-2005, 06:45 PM

Originally Posted by 0l33l

This looks awesome! I'm guessing that the 10 second boot time is w/o POST. Someone would have to write a program that would automatically backup the ramdisk everytime the car is turned on. I think that a 1gb ramdisk would work for almost everyone.

Not sure if you caught that in the article, as long as the power supply is still connected, even if the computer itself is off, the i-RAM will continue taking in power.... so the program would probably need to take into account the difference between computer being turned off and the power supply being turned off.

and yeah, i think its not including the POST, the boot time for the same setup on 74Gig raptor was 15 seconds.

**0l33l** · 07-25-2005, 06:53 PM

Originally Posted by rushnrockt

Not sure if you caught that in the article, as long as the power supply is still connected, even if the computer itself is off, the i-RAM will continue taking in power.... so the program would probably need to take into account the difference between computer being turned off and the power supply being turned off.

and yeah, i think its not including the POST, the boot time for the same setup on 74Gig raptor was 15 seconds.

I read the article. Not all PSUs supply constant 3.3v. Like I do'nt think that inverter powered installs can supply that. And what would happen if you went on a 3 day trip somewere? Say bye bye to your data

Someone's gotta get this and test out the total boot times. I wonder what the time out of standby will be

**John_Duh** · 11-22-2005, 02:40 PM

just thinking out loud here ... you could always have a partition on your hd with a program such as nero ghost and the image of the ramdisk on there.
ramdisk looses power -> boot from secondary device (HD) -> windows up and running -> restore partition for next boot
This would only cause your boot time to be very long (as it is now) when you loose power

I'm seriously contemplating this as an option to get decen boot times from my carputer (hibernation is a no go here)

**mushin** · 11-22-2005, 02:50 PM

Originally Posted by 0l33l

Someone's gotta get this and test out the total boot times. I wonder what the time out of standby will be

Standby time shouldn't change, since standby keeps main memory alive and doesn't involve disk access. Hibernation times should improve, but you have to ask yourself what's the point? Hibernation moves RAM data to disk so you can cut power, but with this the "disk" is more RAM that's still consuming power. You might as well just go standby without the expensive hardware.

I'm not saying the i-RAM is useless; it's very good if you want fast clean boots. Just not useful for standby/hibernation.