I find interest in this sort of technology a little bewildering. Wouldn't it be better to move that 4GB to main memory (assuming 64-bit here) and have a larger file cache? A file cache with > 10x the bandwidth and significantly less latency?

The only advantage of this scheme is the battery backup. Using the same memory for a file cache or ramdisk would be better in every other respect.

They need a 2nd revision with the following changes

1) Dual 300MBs SATA ports (for 600MBs, 2 ram slots per port)
2) Use DDR2 for larger size and less power draw
3) Support the 4gb DDR2 dimms so you can have a 16gb drive

I guess I'm a little confused as to how it could still take 45 seconds to boot if it was all on solid state, even if limited to 150 meg/sec. I would have expected < 30 seconds. Maybe it was allocating a large swapfile on the hard drive and loading a bunch of drivers/apps from hard drive still during bootup?

My system only takes 43 seconds (15 seconds for hardware initialization, 28 seconds from the Windows loading screen) to boot up to the XP login screen, and I just have a non-RAID hard drive. I don't use virtual memory, so maybe the difference is in allocating the swapfile?

I'm mildly interested in the idea of a high('ish) end thing based on this sort of concept.

gimme a 1u rackmount with fiberchannel or Infiniband interfacing and a few dozen so-dimm slots (ECC of course)

Would make a useful piece of hardware for some tasks. (be completely useless most of the time, as is this) but... oooh, my nerd sense is tingling.

Why wasn't I-Ram compared to SCSI devices? It's up there in it's price range and it's storage capacity is quite low. I would think the best competitor for this product would be SCSI products not desktop storage devices, even Raptors are alot cheaper then this...

And the only people that would care about drivers for a device that is such a important part of your computer are people that run Linux... "It's not Linux compatible! I can't run my one game on it!", oh nos...

Ultimately, I find these results pretty disappointing.

For starters, the server tests are practically meaningless for desktop use. I read an interesting piece on this on storagereport.com, but you can see it pretty easily when you compare the orders of magnitude improvement in server tests and the 50% at best improvement for desktop tests. Even with ECC memory this thing is useless for a server, IMO.

Anyhow, at a minimum, as mentioned in other posts, SATA II, ECC ram is definitively necessary for desktop use. 8 GB of space would be a nice to have, but buying all that ram might make it too expensive a product for most.

I saw a few people saying that there is no point in using this drive, since adding more ram would give you the same results. The reason the drive is interesting is that the data needs to go from your hard drive to your ram, and that is very slow - if you think about it, the more RAM you have, the more data needs to be transfered. In addition, from what I hear Windows has a screwy way of caching, which makes it hit the disk more than you would want.

I can see one dramatic way to improve on their design though:

the i-RAM is already on the PCI bus (ideally it would be the PCI-E), so to get orders of magnitude improvements in throughput I would do the following: use the SATA interface when booting and when drivers aren't installed. But then, make drivers so that, once installed, the OS is actually routing it's IO calls through the PCI bus - voila!

If SATA II is used, we may see throughputs that are 2-3 times higher than the fastest hard disk. Maybe that's enough to warrant buying the thing. Having a disk that is well over 10x faster would be another matter entirely, I believe.

The lack of ECC support is unforgivable IMO. Soft error rates of current DRAMs are good, but not good enough to be used for long-term storage without some sort of error correction. Eventually you'll start getting randomly flipped bits here and there, and you'll be left scratching your head wondering why things have gotten flaky.

Worthy addition for Temp file space and a Pagefile.

Check out this forum link to the I-RAM in action...its awesome
http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=37744

this will be a good way to test processor power eh? You can use it to do game level loads and find the new bottle-necks... (well it would be more helpful if it was at 300mb/s).

It's very simple:

If data becomes corrupted in memory before it is stored on a RAID array, it will be recorded in its corrupted form and the system will henceforth treat it as valid.

ECC Ram is intended to prevent this .

Edit: Dammit, this was intended as a response to #74. That's what I get for forgetting to allow JavaScript on this site.

What if you installed a shooter game or some game with lots of scenery directly to this device? 4 Gb is enough to accomodate several game CD's. Back in ancient days (circa 1986) I used to keep my FORTRAN compiler and output files on a couple of 4 Mb JRAM cards. Also Ultima ran pretty slick when copied onto and run from the ram disk.

I guess the level load tests suggest that once a level is loaded, the game has no need to hit the storage device. So, no speedup?

you'd better pray that power is always available. Especially if you live on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. Thats alot of data to be lost. The only thing that will save you is a hdd to back up to. I thought long and hard on this as I was seriously considering it. Way back I heard of N-RAM or somethin like that that holds the info without power. I forget where it was, but it would be really useful in a situation like this. Very fast, very quiet, and very cool(more like cold next to hdd's) solution. Me Likey.

Interesting idea, but I think a 64-bit OS with an extra 4GB of RAM on the motherboard would give much better overall results.

This sounds like a great start. I would like to see it compared to using a flash-based hdd next. I've used compact flash based drives in the past as being solid state they are less prone to sudden death, use less power, are often faster, and fit in small places. I'd like to know how they compare to this ram-based drive.

It might be awesome to have a combination of the two. The major downside of flash-based drives is that they can only be written to a given number of times before wearing out. (100,000 times or some such number.) A hybrid RAM/flash device could do most of it's reading and writing from the RAM with occassional syncs and a sync on power loss so that the unit could retain information for long periods of time without power.

Another option would be a standard hdd combined with this RAM drive to use the RAM as a giant cache which should speed things up a lot for most operations. A 600GB drive probably still only accesses 4GB of data on a regular basis.

Regardless of weather you think this particular product is good or not, the concept is rather interesting. I am a little confused as to why they would not use flash memory in place of RAM sticks which require continuous power….. I think I read that flash degrades with every read/write, is that the case?
Any way, judging by the results the shear speed of the device is promising. I think in 5 years we will start to see PC storage solutions start to goto some sort of solid state device….or as soon at manufacturing becomes more affordable.

BTW, this reminds me about an idea i had sometime ago:

Instead of buying expensive Raid-controllers with cache, or exchaning ram modules over and over again (as most MB only have 4 of those), why not create a SATA or IDE interface, that plugs between the mainboard and the drive, where you could add an SD-RAM or DDR-RAM module.

You could easily boost the cache of your drives to 128 mbytes and more.

Actually not too bad. 4GB is enough for a boot drive and swap file, but I'd want some sort of automated way to backup and recover from a power loss to the device. IO is not suprisingly stupid fast, although I question how much that will really improve your computing experience.

Good idea slapping a Li-Ion battery on it. Looks like something straight out of my digicam. If it really does consistently last 10 hours without power, that's enough to take the rig to a LAN party a state away, or survive a power outage.

So, give me software so that my computer will still boot normally and recover itself in the event of a power and battery failure (i.e. it automatically backs up the data to a magnetic drive, and rebuilds itself), and I'm there. Just need to justify $400-500.

Very interesting stuff. They definitely need to offer 300MB/s SATA, ECC, and PCI-E support, though.

Though I was kinda curious what your observations on the effect of running the Windows paging file from this device were. I see that boot times were a bit quicker, but was Windows noticeably snappier, especially after having been running for a while with tasks running in the background?

To me, a significant performance advantage in this regard would be a major selling point alone.

I think a product like this would be ideal for OLTP databases. In Oracle you could create a tablespaces that contains performance-critical objects. Your logs would still run off of a conventional hard drive, so you don't need to put all of your objects into RAM. I think 2 or 4 of these cards running in a RAID array would be a cheap way to put together a very impressive database server.

Related link:

http://www.dbazine.com/oracle/or-articles/ault6

Well, I suppose this is in some way a reply to my question on the Back Porch last weekend about hitting a technology plateau. Very interesting read. Good work as usual, TR!

Nice piece of hardware. Should be updated to 300MBs.
But why put it on a pci solution?
I would prefer a standart 3.5 or 5.25 inch case solution.
The Pci solution has some advantage for users with small cases.
Most important: Keep it driverless !

Not in stock at Tigerdirect. Looks like Compumusic has them with a Jan 31st ETA.

eh, I'de like to see this move to a 5.25 bay with a larger battery and 8 dim slots, while at the same time utilizing cheaper, specialized circuitry and supporting multiple SATA channels.

This would be really useful to a wider audience if you could buy 2 or 3 of them for that price with support for 8 dimms a piece. 512mb dimms get pretty damn cheap, and a lot of us have a few laying around or waiting to be upgraded, but with only 4 dimm slots per card you save money by going with larger dimms.

Product with not enough forethought.

Would be an excellent solution for a Linux/Apache based web server, but the lack of ECC support kills it.

As for general system usage... Just don't see where adding it would be any benefit over just slapping in more RAM and letting the system cache do it's job.

The 4GB limit is a real pain in the ass too. I can't even fit my favorite game on that. :P

The lack of ECC support also makes it poorly suited for the pagefile or scratch disk. Who wants to suffer a soft error in their pagefile or scratch disk? Hello BSOD.

I have to agree with Alanzilla on this. A solution looking for a problem.

Imagine 4 of these bad boys in raid-0. 16GB should be enough for running off of, I would think. As long as you're not installing games or anything like that.

First thought -- hey, here's a use for all that cast-off PC2100 and/or PC2700 RAM people have left over from their old rigs. Second thought: crap, that's all 128MB or 256MB sticks, so you're not going to get a useful size disk out of it. D'oh.

Bottom line: solution looking for a problem.

Well, up this to SATA 300 and ill get one as a huge nice and fast swap-disk. Doing larger panoramas from film-scans puts me through the 2GB roof of the RAM in no time at all. Having a dedicated 4GB sawp-disk would be great at times like that. Sure, its slower then true RAM, but it sure is alot faster then normal drives. But SATA 300 would be the best.