My i-RAM article is live. It's a lot later than expected, but I had to wait for a few more responses from Gigabyte in Taiwan before putting it live.
The i-RAM we reviewed is the shipping version of the card, which differs in a few ways from what we talked about at Computex. The biggest difference? The i-RAM will retail for $150, not $50 as mentioned at Computex. A big part of the price difference is the initial 1K run of the product; if Gigabyte ramped up production significantly, and transitioned away from using a FPGA to a custom IC for the board, that cost could be brought down significantly. But they'd have to ship a lot of i-RAM boards to justify producing their own IC for these things, and they won't ship a lot without a lower price, and so on and so forth.
The card is pretty cool, honestly the one thing that floors me every time is how quickly you can copy files around on it. I know it's just RAM and it's actually slow as far as memory-to-memory copies, but in Windows all you see is a drive letter, and copying at ~100MB/s is just something I'm not used to on a normal computer.
I'm not sure what I'd do with an i-RAM in my personal system, but if I could fit 8GB or more on one (or RAID two together) then I start having a few ideas of what I could do.
The i-RAM we reviewed is the shipping version of the card, which differs in a few ways from what we talked about at Computex. The biggest difference? The i-RAM will retail for $150, not $50 as mentioned at Computex. A big part of the price difference is the initial 1K run of the product; if Gigabyte ramped up production significantly, and transitioned away from using a FPGA to a custom IC for the board, that cost could be brought down significantly. But they'd have to ship a lot of i-RAM boards to justify producing their own IC for these things, and they won't ship a lot without a lower price, and so on and so forth.
The card is pretty cool, honestly the one thing that floors me every time is how quickly you can copy files around on it. I know it's just RAM and it's actually slow as far as memory-to-memory copies, but in Windows all you see is a drive letter, and copying at ~100MB/s is just something I'm not used to on a normal computer.
I'm not sure what I'd do with an i-RAM in my personal system, but if I could fit 8GB or more on one (or RAID two together) then I start having a few ideas of what I could do.
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StanleyBuchanan - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I would love to have 12GB to work with...That's Windows XP, a productivity suite, and 1 modern game.
Anything beyond that... NAS
lolerton - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I think this product is very interesting, but it really needs to have 8 or 16 slots, and slow DDR has to cost <$50 GB . Whenever that happens, (2 years?) a huge market for this type of device will exist. Perhaps they could put it in a double size HD enclosure and use 4 pin molex connectors instead? Space starts becoming the big problem I suppose when you're talking about eight or more slots.houst - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I was wondering if the following is possible:1). install windows xp on the i-ram drive
2). boot windows xp off another HDD on same comp (d:\windows, for instance)
3). copy c:\Program Files\ (from i-ram) onto a temporary folder on the other HDD
4). copy c:\documents and settings\ onto a temporary folder on the other HDD
5). with a third hard, unpartitioned HDD, create 2 NTFS partitions (let's say 10 gigs each)
6). mount one partition as C:\Program Files\ using Disk Management
7). copy program files back to c:\Program Files
8). repeat steps 6-7 for Documents and Settings
So, what would this do? In theory (untested of course because I do not have a i-ram drive) you should be able to boot winXP fast while still being able to install programs in C:\Program Files\ and use My Documents...
Thoughts?
ViRGE - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
It's overly complex. When Program Files and similar directories are accessed, the program doing it is basically just following a symlink/shortcut provided by Windows; all you'd need to do is use PowerTools/RegEdit to change where Windows thinks these directories are, and you'd have accomplished the same thing without so much work or partition madness. It's a reasonable idea though as long as you're sure your Windows i-Ram card won't be powerless for too long.Houdani - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
It definitely has some potential, but I'm thinking this version is too limited. If it makes it to ver2 or ver3 we'll have something worth tinkering with, but I will pass on this go 'round.Captante - Wednesday, July 27, 2005 - link
For $50 I would have ordered one of these right away since I have 3 1gb DIMMS doing nothing in a box right now...for $150 they can keep it. :/kleinwl - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
One point that would be interesting in knowing if something like the I-Ram could be programmed for, so that all paging out always uses the I-Ram (effectively increasing your ram) or commonally used files could be placed on it, something like a 8GB cache for a hard-drive.8GB is too small to put every file on (even though I would really like to)... but if the 80% most used files are automatically installed on that 8GB I think that most programs would see an increase in productivity.