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Review: GIGABYTE GC-RAMDISK i-RAM

by Steve Kerrison on 27 July 2006, 07:53

Tags: Gigabyte (TPE:2376)

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Look at the figures for the Gigabyte i-RAM and you could very easily be blown away by them and talked into buying one. We do, however, have a few reservations. Firstly, we think the i-RAM is being held back. Yup, you read right. The 1.5Gbps SATA controller isn't fast enough. Get a 3Gbps PHY on there. Hell, stick it on a 4x/8x PCIe interface and give it some real bandwidth.

Our next issue, and this is a real concern, is that of using volatile memory to store data. There's the battery backup, of course, but even on the revisions with the level indicators it's hard to get to, and we feel a bit too easy to forget about, the result of which could be data loss. We're not sure how long the 1600mAh battery will keep RAM ticking over for either, but it will no doubt depend on the modules and the number present.

Gigabyte has produced a backup utility that allows an image of the i-RAM to be made and restored quite easily. However, it's interactive, so cannot be scheduled, we don't think. Therefore, we'd still say the i-RAM's uses are limited to storing data that's relatively unimportant, like page file, temporary files and scratch space. Clearly its performance will hugely benefit these areas, unless you've got plenty of free RAM anyway.

So, Gigabyte's i-RAM is extremely fast, but its usage is, we feel, somewhat limited. Firstly, you've got to need it, i.e. not have any RAM slots left and find disks being thrashed around a lot. Then, you're limited by what you can confidently do with it. Perhaps, though, that's just a prejudice towards RAM and battery backup talking. Let's not forget to ask ourselves whether the performance this will deliver will actually be worthwhile; will something else in the system simply holds things back? Finally, it costs around Ā£110. Add in the RAM, and it ain't cheap. You could have a lot of (admittedly slower) disk storage for the same money.

To wrap things up, how could we get away with not giving the Gigabyte i-RAM an award for speed? It deserves it, for sure. However, we'll hold back on recommending it; the people who really could do with (and afford) it are probably getting their plastic out already anyway.

HEXUS Awards :: Extreme - Speed



HEXUS Forums :: 38 Comments

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Don't know where I've read, but there's something that the battery is only capable to keep the data overnight, some 12 hours, that's not quite good.
for the purposes of a scratch area it appears this would help improve the overall performance of a machine, but the cost is a bit steep :( I was wondering though how it would perform in a 3 way test involving conventional hdd's & these new “hybrid” hdds
SpawnofSonic
for the purposes of a scratch area it appears this would help improve the overall performance of a machine, but the cost is a bit steep :( I was wondering though how it would perform in a 3 way test involving conventional hdd's & these new “hybrid” hdds
The hybrids use flash memory (IIRC) which is still a lot slower than RAM, but it would certainly give them an advantage over regular HDDs. However, I'm not sure whether our particular testing regime would show that.
I am getting really annoyed that the people who make this sort of hardware always put a limiting factor on it, by this I mean a PCI bus instead of a PCI-E bus, SATA150 instead of SATA300. Have hardware developers not heard of PCI express?!

On to the solution for backing up this drive there is a much easier way: ACRONIS (true image?). It comes with its own backing up schedule solution and so you could schedule a backup every 10hrs or so, a restore is equally as easy as backing aswell

I won't be getting this RAMdisk or any other RAMdisk until there are ones which use both SATA300 and PCI-E. Same as RAID card aswell tbh.

EDIT: To further illustrate my point http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?14941 . Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't ATA have a maximum transfer speed of 133Mbps?
Its normally down to the cost of implmentation and r&d costs - i.e its cheaper to implement technology they know more about.