*FINALLY*

[Sqube]

This is for early-adopters and technophiles more than anything else; I can see copyin a game over to the thing and running it from there to get wicked-fast access/load times. Half-Life 2 or something like that.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Originally posted by: 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

And if your run 2 in RAID0 ("He said RAID0, kick his ass!!!) the transfer rates are in the 95MB/sec to 125MB/sec range

 

[MobiusPizza]

I am sure I can mod it so that it take power from my aquarium
So my Windows on the RAM disk won't die before the time my goldfish die

 

[Promethply]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy

Originally posted by: 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

And if your run 2 in RAID0 ("He said RAID0, kick his ass!!!) the transfer rates are in the 95MB/sec to 125MB/sec range

That's true.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Originally posted by: 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)

Or you could just install the whole damn Window on there and not worry about it. (Don't put anything on my documents though )

 

[squirrelman]

Has anyone seen anything more than just that coverage about it yet? I will literally buy this the day its available. My main concern is if it has to be used in a Gigabyte mobo, and if it does they better damn well hurry up with their dual opteron board lol. This is what i've been waiting for more than anything else. I have very little need for it, but I want it really baaaaaaaaaaaad.

 

[Elcs]

Can we stick these RAM Disks in RAID?

Ugh.

 

[ryanv12]

I do like the idea of putting your swap file on there. I have a few sticks of PC2100 laying around that are useless, but I will most definitely use them for the swap file.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: squirrelman
Has anyone seen anything more than just that coverage about it yet? I will literally buy this the day its available. My main concern is if it has to be used in a Gigabyte mobo, and if it does they better damn well hurry up with their dual opteron board lol. This is what i've been waiting for more than anything else. I have very little need for it, but I want it really baaaaaaaaaaaad.

They said compatibility should not be a problem, because it is simply powered by the PCI-E slot and is detected via the SATA as an HD.

I really hope anand gets ahold of one of these, PC3200 is 3.2GB/sec so it should easily be able to max out 300MB/sec for sataII.

 

[squirrelman]

If that article posted at the top is right, its not even a PCI-e slot its just a normal 32bit PCI slot. I also probably wouldn't waste my time with PC3200 since it would be overkill. PC2100 seems to be the cheapst so that would probably be the best bet. I just want to see now what kind of capacities you can stick in each slot.

 

[Sqube]

This is really interesting to me, and Lord knows it's not like I haven't been looking for more opportunities to spend money...

 

[everman]

Can't wait to see the benchmarks. If configured properly, this could really speed some things up a lot.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: squirrelman
If that article posted at the top is right, its not even a PCI-e slot its just a normal 32bit PCI slot. I also probably wouldn't waste my time with PC3200 since it would be overkill. PC2100 seems to be the cheapst so that would probably be the best bet. I just want to see now what kind of capacities you can stick in each slot.

Thats correct, it is PCI not PCI-E.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: squirrelman
If that article posted at the top is right, its not even a PCI-e slot its just a normal 32bit PCI slot. I also probably wouldn't waste my time with PC3200 since it would be overkill. PC2100 seems to be the cheapst so that would probably be the best bet. I just want to see now what kind of capacities you can stick in each slot.

Thats correct, it is PCI not PCI-E.

The slot is pretty irrelevant, isn't it? It's actually a SATA device, and could easily just be powered with a molex.

If they're smart, they put it in a PCI slot since the board should be giving standby power to PCI slots, right? So that way you can leave the computer off and it still retains data unless your power actually goes out for 16 hours.

 

[squirrelman]

Originally posted by: Tostada

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: squirrelman
If that article posted at the top is right, its not even a PCI-e slot its just a normal 32bit PCI slot. I also probably wouldn't waste my time with PC3200 since it would be overkill. PC2100 seems to be the cheapst so that would probably be the best bet. I just want to see now what kind of capacities you can stick in each slot.

Thats correct, it is PCI not PCI-E.

The slot is pretty irrelevant, isn't it? It's actually a SATA device, and could easily just be powered with a molex.

If they're smart, they put it in a PCI slot since the board should be giving standby power to PCI slots, right? So that way you can leave the computer off and it still retains data unless your power actually goes out for 16 hours.

Well for me at least the fact of it being a PCI or PCI-e makes a difference based on what I actually have on my motherboard. I'm looking into getting the ASUS K8N-DL and that is very limited on slots. It has the PCI-e 16x for the gfx card, then a PCI-e 1x (so far this seems worthless) and a couple of PCI slots. Since nobody seems to be making PCI-e 1x cards the fact that this is PCI for me at least is huge

 

[SVT Cobra]

Originally posted by: 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.

definately...it would be nice to be able to boot windows on one of these...that or put CS:S on it...

 

[FlameDeer]

Very interesting technology! :thumbsup:

Only the 16 hours battery would cause problem, we don't know when the battery will spoil & we need to change it. All data will be lost if that happen (we don't know the battery is out of function & we turn off the power).

Since the PCI interface is only for providing power, why not they just save the PCI pin & give it an external storage case. Make it external would have many benefits:
1. With a dedicated power adapter to provide continuos power even though the PC is turn off for long time.
2. Can use SATA interface to connect to PC casing external SATA port, even can add in Firewire or USB 2.0 interface for more flexibility.
3. Providing it still come with a battery in the external case, then it would be portable ultra fast drive.

Anand said it support DDR200 memory I think he means PC1600. So using old PC2100 ram with large capacity is a good choice.

If we get 3 of this ramdisk, each of them with 4x512MB PC2100 and using all 3 in RAID0 mode (since solid state storage wouldn't have normal HDD crash problem). Then we'll have 6GB of Ultra Fast storage that simply out perform any storage interface out there!! Enough for swapfile & install game. Game will load in seconds away from click!
(Just wondering is there any attemp to create RAID0 system for high capacity & high x compact flash memory card too )

Very good approach but much to improve they still have!

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: FlameDeer
Very interesting technology! :thumbsup:

Only the 16 hours battery would cause problem, we don't know when the battery will spoil & we need to change it. All data will be lost if that happen (we don't know the battery is out of function & we turn off the power).

Since the PCI interface is only for providing power, why not they just save the PCI pin & give it an external storage case. Make it external would have many benefits:
1. With a dedicated power adapter to provide continuos power even though the PC is turn off for long time.
2. Can use SATA interface to connect to PC casing external SATA port, even can add in Firewire or USB 2.0 interface for more flexibility.
3. Providing it still come with a battery in the external case, then it would be portable ultra fast drive.

Anand said it support DDR200 memory I think he means PC1600. So using old PC2100 ram with large capacity is a good choice.

If we get 3 of this ramdisk, each of them with 4x512MB PC2100 and using all 3 in RAID0 mode (since solid state storage wouldn't have normal HDD crash problem). Then we'll have 6GB of Ultra Fast storage that simply out perform any storage interface out there!! Enough for swapfile & install game. Game will load in seconds away from click!
(Just wondering is there any attemp to create RAID0 system for high capacity & high x compact flash memory card too )

Very good approach but much to improve they still have!

Im pretty sure that current bus techology would limit being able to use Raid with these devices, it would work, but youd likely just gain capacity, not speed.

As for flash memory, its too slow to implement this way.

 

[T9D]

I'm going to buy one.

Perfect for games and temp files. Perfect for working on photoshop or audio mixing or anything else too. Can just move the whole folder onto the drive before starting work, work all day, then save the whole folder onto the regular hard drive when done. I dont know. Seems like I could find plenty of things to do with it. Would be good for installing trial MMOPRG games too. Think of how often they hit the harddrive. And plus it takes forever to unpack those things. Then when you are done you just wipe it and no need to even defrag. Seems like it could really extend the life of your normal harddrive.

I just hope too that it will go onto any motherboard. And I dont understand why they didn't just have an external powersupply for it. Either Way I'll buy one and let you know what I think when they come out.

 

[Auric]

'twould be child's play to hook up an external power source if longer system down times were expected or desired.

Even without, it would be quick 'n' easy to copy already installed applications like games over to the RAM drive for running (pre-install to drive letter that will be used for RAM drive, or else edit registry accordingly).

Summary: gimme.

 

[bluemax]

I don't think many of you realize the difference in speed.... When it comes to searching for many small files, this thing will simply FLY! That's the weakest link on a current hard drive - seek times. Sure, there might not be much difference loading a 2GB file (what moron would use this to hold a DivX??) but for file-intensive tasks, like the Windows swap file, certain databases, etc... this thing would rock!

...and I'd be surprised if the card didn't come with software that'll automatically dump the contents of RAMdisk to HDD on shutdown, etc.

This is not for gamers or average users - plain and simple. Disk-intensive tasks only.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: 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

If you're using enough RAM that you are ever hitting the swapfile, turning it off would be a Very Bad Idea. If you're not using enough RAM to hit the swapfile, modification of the swapfile settings should have no impact whatsoever on performance (other than that you might *slightly* reduce OS overhead by turning it off, depending on how stupidly it is implemented). While it is annoying that you cannot truly disable the swapfile in Windows, this has essentially zero impact on any real-world performance situation.

At $50 it would be a very attractive product for a lot of servers or high-end workstations, especially if it can take 4x1GB of RAM.

 

[deveraux]

People have mentioned installing Windows on this or even transfering game files across to help with loading times, however, I doubt that it is very feasible unless it is able to accept 4x1GB of RAM since 2GB of storage space by today's standards is peanuts. HL2 won't even fit in a 4GB much less 2GB so there goes that idea. I think they should have put more RAM slots on this thing so that its capacity can be well in the 5-10GB range where it would actually be possible for home users to get more of an advantage from it.

Nevertheless, I think it is a big step in the right direction, at least until we have much much faster HDDs since a Windows running off this ramdisk will pretty much have close to zero lag while running. Also, if the swapfile is on this ramdisk, it would mitigate a lot of main memory concerns as the performance hit won't be nearly as bad as going to HDD for data (not saying that we don't need main memory though).

My $0.02

 

[Brian23]

I'ma get one and put 4x 1GB in it. Load windoze on it and rock.

 

[imported_whatever]

I would guess that you could (admittedly voiding the warranty) put in a pair of D cell NIMH (which I assume it uses) batteries and greatly extend the battery life.