*FINALLY*

[Acanthus]

Computex

Am i reading this right? we are talking 5ns seek times and only a $250 price of entry for 2GB? (4x512 + $50 for the card itself), They also appear to have the bandwidth and compatiblity issues figured out by having the card output through SATA, and the battery backup so you dont lose data on restart is another large plus.

Ill definately be watching for these in stores.

 

[Bar81]

Yeah, all that is cool and everything except for the crap 16 hour battery. This is a dead product.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
*FINALLY*

Yes, the Gigabyte card with onboard battery and lower price seems to be a better solution than the (been around so long), Rocket Drive.
DDR vs PC-133 for these type "drives" don't make much difference at all when compared to slow mechanical HDs.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Bar81
Yeah, all that is cool and everything except for the crap 16 hour battery. This is a dead product.

So youd rather pay $4000 for an SRAM drive? or do you want a $500 UPS for your 2GB of ramdisk space?

Its not hard to leave the PC on.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
or do you want a $500 UPS for your 2GB of ramdisk space?

I'll sell you one for 1/2 that.

 

[Bateluer]

Couldn't you stick 4x1GB modules in there, or 2x256MB modules, varying the price?

 

[TStep]

Maybe not the final solution to the harddrive, but it's nice to see some effort going into alternatives for one of the slowest components in a system.

 

[Bar81]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Bar81
Yeah, all that is cool and everything except for the crap 16 hour battery. This is a dead product.

So youd rather pay $4000 for an SRAM drive? or do you want a $500 UPS for your 2GB of ramdisk space?

Its not hard to leave the PC on.

Or.... I just buy a regular hard drive. Unlike you I don't get excited about silly technology. What happens if you have a blackout that lasts more than 16 hours? Oh gee, guess all your data's gone. What if I'm going on vacation and want to turn everything off for safety. Gee, guess all the data's gone. It's a silly concept that only a silly person would get excited about.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Bar81
It's a silly concept that only a silly person would get excited about.

I'm with you. :laugh: If it's faster than our Pentium 233... we just don't need it. :shocked:
Let these kids play with their new P3's, we'll be just fine.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Bar81

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Bar81
Yeah, all that is cool and everything except for the crap 16 hour battery. This is a dead product.

So youd rather pay $4000 for an SRAM drive? or do you want a $500 UPS for your 2GB of ramdisk space?

Its not hard to leave the PC on.

Or.... I just buy a regular hard drive. Unlike you I don't get excited about silly technology. What happens if you have a blackout that lasts more than 16 hours? Oh gee, guess all your data's gone. What if I'm going on vacation and want to turn everything off for safety. Gee, guess all the data's gone. It's a silly concept that only a silly person would get excited about.

what happens if you use the drive as intended and only put apps that need speed and swapfile on there?

Its not supposed to replace hard drives, its supposed to supplement performance where needed.

 

[biostud]

All it needed was a separate powerplug, so that it don't turn off when the computer does (even though it has 16 hours battery time).

Otherwise we now have something to do with our old DDR ram when AMD switches to DDR-II

 

[Zebo]

Look home made to me. And 16 hours is pretty lame as well.

Otherwise we now have something to do with our old DDR ram

What is that exactly? I mean performance wise by what mechanism would I see it? And where?

 

[phisrow]

Sure, having a magic nonvolatile ramdrive would be rather nice; but it isn't as though dding/ghosting over your ramdrive to your hardrive before shutting down for an extended period would be all that difficult. I imagine that your wallet would hurt more than your patience for pretty much anything over 4gigs, so it wouldn't be much of a burden.

 

[Zebo]

Ya need about 30 gigs of this and permanently powered. This way you can install all OS. all your main apps space wise and come back and its still there.

I dunno though. How much faster this xfer than a HDD like Raptor? Anand said "xfer rates improved" whatever that means. Improved over what? And by how much?

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Zebo
Look home made to me. And 16 hours is pretty lame as well.

Otherwise we now have something to do with our old DDR ram

What is that exactly? I mean performance wise by what mechanism would I see it? And where?

When you upgrade to DDRII you could simply use your old memory in this drive. 150MB/sec and 5ns seek times dont appeal to you?

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Zebo
Ya need about 30 gigs of this and permanently powered. This way you can install all OS. all your main apps space wise and come back and its still there.

I dunno though. How much faster this xfer than a HDD like Raptor? Anand said "xfer rates improved" whatever that means. Improved over what? And by how much?

Raptors transfer about 50MB/sec sequential. The max speed of SATAII is 300MB/sec, DDR is well above that mark.

Edit: How do you suggest "permanently powering" memory? the only memory that holds a charge is SRAM, and for 30 gigs of SRAM youre talking about $75,000.

 

[CrispyFried]

Originally posted by: Bar81

Or.... I just buy a regular hard drive. Unlike you I don't get excited about silly technology. What happens if you have a blackout that lasts more than 16 hours? Oh gee, guess all your data's gone. What if I'm going on vacation and want to turn everything off for safety. Gee, guess all the data's gone. It's a silly concept that only a silly person would get excited about.

lol well if youre silly enough not to copy the ram drive over to a real hd before the ups goes out or you go on vacation I guess you just might lose that data.

Did you post this from your CP/M machine or what..??

 

[Promethply]

A ramdisk biggest strength is its access (seek) time AFAIK, but its transfer rate's not that good compared to most current HDs, including the Raptor.

And the fact that it is based on volatile memory may turn off most people, IMO.

 

[Zebo]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Zebo
Look home made to me. And 16 hours is pretty lame as well.

Otherwise we now have something to do with our old DDR ram

What is that exactly? I mean performance wise by what mechanism would I see it? And where?

When you upgrade to DDRII you could simply use your old memory in this drive. 150MB/sec and 5ns seek times dont appeal to you?

hows it cache? My problem is most everything goes into main memory right now which is much faster than this ramdrive. Anything going into that ram disk would also need to be requested from HDD ultimatly before going into main memory. Again I just don't understand the mechanism of improvement here.

 

[Promethply]

No existing SATA or PATA HDs can saturate even the Ultra ATA133 bandwidth of 133MB/sec,

and the Raptor transfer rates starts at around 71MB/sec, and ends at 53MB/sec, so even its lowest rate is higher than 50MB/sec -- here's a link:

Western Digital Raptor WD740GD

Raptors transfer about 50MB/sec sequential. The max speed of SATAII is 300MB/sec, DDR is well above that mark.

 

[MDE]

Originally posted by: Zebo

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Zebo
Look home made to me. And 16 hours is pretty lame as well.

Otherwise we now have something to do with our old DDR ram

What is that exactly? I mean performance wise by what mechanism would I see it? And where?

When you upgrade to DDRII you could simply use your old memory in this drive. 150MB/sec and 5ns seek times dont appeal to you?

hows it cache? My problem is most everything goes into main memory right now which is much faster than this ramdrive. Anything going into that ram disk would also need to be requested from HDD ultimatly before going into main memory. Again I just don't understand the mechanism of improvement here.

It doesn't need to cache, the data is already sitting in "RAM" so it just sends the data when it's requested.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Zebo

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Zebo
Look home made to me. And 16 hours is pretty lame as well.

Otherwise we now have something to do with our old DDR ram

What is that exactly? I mean performance wise by what mechanism would I see it? And where?

When you upgrade to DDRII you could simply use your old memory in this drive. 150MB/sec and 5ns seek times dont appeal to you?

hows it cache? My problem is most everything goes into main memory right now which is much faster than this ramdrive. Anything going into that ram disk would also need to be requested from HDD ultimatly before going into main memory. Again I just don't understand the mechanism of improvement here.

1. you can put the windows swapfile on there
2. you could directly install a game to it, dramatically decreasing load times, in my case, Counterstrike source or World of Warcraft (assuming i could shell out for 4GB of memory)

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Promethply
A ramdisk biggest strength is its access (seek) time AFAIK, but its transfer rate's not that good compared to most current HDs, including the Raptor.

And the fact that it is based on volatile memory may turn off most people, IMO.

This isnt flash memory, its DDR, it should be significantly faster.

 

[Tostada]

I think this is a good idea simply because Windows is still too stupid to function correctly if I turn off the swapfile.

It's sad, really.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Tostada
I think this is a good idea simply because Windows is still too stupid to function correctly if I turn off the swapfile.

It's sad, really.

I feel your pain