Gigabyte's website now has specs for the i-RAM Box:

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Product [...] uctID=2678


We'd like to order a pair for testing.

Word on the street is that it's presently
being sold by a distributor in Hong Kong.

If any of you find a retailer in the USA
who is stocking this item, please let us know.


Thanks!


Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library
http://www.supremelaw.org/

I dunno where this product fits in. Seems like if you needed it you'd take the jump to 64 bit which would cost less and be faster.

Whether in single device or RAID setup, it eliminates the
overhead of head seeks and latency in all Hard Disk Drives.

And, this design is superior to the first edition, which
required 5V stand-by power from a standard PCI slot;
this 5.25" version gets SB power from the power supply.

Granted, the RAM is volatile, but there are solutions to
that problem, e.g. on-board battery + a good UPS.

Scroll about two-thirds down this page for several photos
that also report a few performance measurements:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forum [...] hp?t=86442

We've gathered more photos for "fair use" purposes here:

http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/gigabyte/

... plus 2 versions of the User Manual.

See also more discussion here:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-righ [...] ram-3.html


Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library
http://www.supremelaw.org/

FYI: an expensive competitor from the UK called
the "HyperDrive 4" was recently reviewed at THG here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] e_storage/


... hence the interest in less expensive but equally fast
alternatives.


Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library
http://www.supremelaw.org/

Comments from a user of the i-RAM, prior PCI version:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-righ [...] ram-2.html

15-09-2007, 03:47 AM

Re: HEXUS.reviews :: GIGABYTE GC-RAMDISK i-RAM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All,

I've read your posts, and it's sad that a lot of you (luckily, not all) make reviews or assumptions about products you've never touched or seen in action. Also, with every new product out there, there will always be those who want more and I'm one of those who "want more." However, I do own an i-RAM, and I've tinkered with it in several ways.

Let me start off by saying it *is* blindingly fast, despite that some of you complian it not being SATA-II or DDR2 or whatever the latest and greatest technology is. The fact is, RAM is built upon random-access and hard drives are not. The mechanical aspect of hard drives slows them down except for sequential reads, period. They have to do millions of reads and writes, and those 8 millisecond seek times all add up. RAM, on the other hand, eliminates seek times altogether. File Fragmentation Worries are a thing of the past.

Just to give you an idea, my Windows XP installation typically boots up somewhere around 90 seconds from a SATA-I hard disk. This includes the power-up of the system, booting up to the GINA, loading the desktop, and waiting for that last program to finish executing. With the i-RAM as my primary drive, it completes this process in about 7 seconds. SEVEN. To the desktop, awaiting my next command. Most of that 7 seconds is POST and hardware initialization. (For the testing, I was utilizing Norton Ghost for imaging the drives).

I proceeded to test additional applications, including Microsoft Office 2003, and I put 32 applications in the Startup menu. (I had to remove a lot of unneeded files and reduce the size of the page file to do this test on 4 GB of storage, but on the plus-side Office 2003 took less than 2 minutes to install). I rebooted again, and it took about 1 additional second to load all the those applications AT THE SAME TIME. They loaded so fast, I could barely see each window pop open -- literally blindingly fast. Could it be faster? Sure. Would the difference be humanly discernable? Probably not. Once you change your system disk to RAM, it's no longer a bottleneck, and you'll be spoiled to Hell and back.

As for the comments regarding the pagefile, it doesn't matter how much RAM you add to your system. The pagefile is a necessary evil. Why, you wonder? I did, too. It's NOT additional memory per se. It's part of memory management. Memory is requested by software/drivers/etc., and memory is wasted by those same programs because they usually request more than they really need (it's a programming thing). They all have the freedom to address 4 GB of RAM *regardless* of how much you really have installed. The pagefile permits this fixed addressing space to occur, and faults pages of unused or idle memory to this file. If you turn off the pagefile, you'll just be shooting yourself in the foot. Those programs will simply waste RAM and leave nothing for other programs to use, leading to inevitable "out of memory" error messages. The i-RAM is perfect for hosting your pagefile, along with Temporary Internet Files, TEMP folders, Photoshop scratch disks, P2P temp folders, and anything else that reads and writes a lot during processing.

Now, about wanting more: The improvement which is obviously in immediate desire is MORE storage. 4 GB isn't much, even for plain vanilla Windows XP, and unacceptable to Vista. 8 GB? Could still be quickly filled when including applications like Office, the pagefile, and the endless service packs and patches for Windows. 12-16 GB is preferred. Granted the hardware needs to be designed for 2 GB RAM chips and so does your wallet. But, should they go this route, and should you experience it, you'll realize why hard drives are becoming antiquated these days. Flash memory is free of seek times, but bandwidth is still not quite up there. You'd have to stripe about 8 flash devices to get close to SATA-I speeds. Good luck with that, especially budget-wise.

Next desire would be some sort of live backup. The included software allows periodic backups, but for an operating system it's not enough peace-of-mind. The battery keeps i-RAM alive even when power is disconnected from the PC. PCI slots are HOT even when the computer is off -- as long as the power supply is also hot. The battery is NOT used until you physically unplug the power supply and the battery lasts several hours. Some sort of RAID-1 configuration would be helpful, perhaps a dedicated SATA or flash device to keep a mirror copy on in the event of catastrophic power loss. The disk could just be read back to RAM should this happen while operating in critical-mode, and soon you'd be on your merry lightspeed way. (Does anybody know if RAID-1 will always prioritize reads from the fastest disk? If so, any RAID-1 can be setup with the i-RAM as one disk and a mechanical drive as the second.) This mirror would be kept up-to-date in the background when i-RAM is not answering requests.

And, my last request for an update is an external case or bay-mounted box to put the card in, with a DC power supply. This way, I have the option to use a PCI slot or not.

Now, if you research a bit deeper, HyperOS Systems out of the UK has developed the HyperDrive 4 -- which can now hold up to 32 GB of RAM, has SATA and PATA connectors, is a 5.25" bay mounted RAM drive, and has an option for automatic backups to a direct-mounted flash or 2.5" drive. However, its price is enormous by comparison -- approximately $4200 for a fully loaded 16 GB model, while the i-RAM cost me $380 fully loaded with 4 GB of RAM. Do the math: 4 x $380 = 16 GB @ $1,520. So, with a few spare PCI slots, you can have something worthy of your brand-new quintuple-core 8 GHz extreme processor with a 1566 Mhz FSB and 2 GB cache.

I'm planning to build a cheaper, secondary motherboard-in-a-box with power only (no CPU, no RAM) just to power 3 to 4 i-RAM drives and then use a SATA RAID controller in my primary computer to utilize them all, thus freeing up the space in my primary box and getting 16 GB of lightning-speed storage. The secondary box will be cooled, small, and sit next to (or on top of) my primary computer, with SATA cables running into my primary (or to external SATA connectors if I go that route). It still remains to be seen how the i-RAM might perform as part of a mirrored set with a mechanical disk. I imagine this depends highly on the RAID controller itself, but it's worth investigating.

I hope this information is helpful to all of you.

dijitul

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Last edited by dijitul : 15-09-2007 at 09:44 PM. Reason: grammar corrections!


p.s. SupremeLaw has archived a photo of a "breadboard" configuration
showing 6 x PCI-slot i-RAMs with SATA cables connected to the host system:

http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/ [...] isk.44.jpg

The 2 motherboards in that photo have empty CPU and DIMM slots,
but main power cables are connected, to supply the 5V "Stand By"
power to the 6 PCI slots hosting those 6 PCI-slot i-RAMs.


Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library
http://www.supremelaw.org/