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Gigabyte ramdisk system - worth the investment?

Kaido

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
Gigabyte has a PCI card that takes ram sticks and turns them into small but fast SATA hard drives, up to 4gb worth. After reading over Anandtech's article on it here, it makes me wonder if it would be worth it to put together a system based on these cards. For example:

-Sonata/Athlon X2/4gb ram/motherboard with 4 or 5 PCI slots/nice video card like a 7800gtx
-4 Gigabyte cards @ $144 each
-16 1gb sticks of Crucial ram @ $140 each
-Raptor 150 @ $281

(1) 4gb card - Windows XP boot drive (XP takes up ~2.5gb on my hard drive now)
(2) 4gb cards in RAID for 8gb - Applications drive (Adobe CS, Office, whatever)
(1) 4gb card - Working files
(1) Raptor 150 - archived files/big files/backup

The system would boot and run off one card. Basic MS apps like Office (~300mb) could go on this drive as well. Applications would be installed and run from the 8gb dual-card drive; Adobe CS and Half-Life 2 could co-exist nicely here. Another 4gb card would hold the current working files and maybe act as a paging file. Add to this 4gb for system ram plus the dual-core Athlon processor. Then toss in the Raptor for big files, file backup, etc. It would cost an arm and a leg, but do you think such a system would be worth the investment for a heavy gamer, graphics professional, etc.? Discuss.
 
The PCI buss might handle data transfer to one card but would probably overloaded running four/five cards at once. I wouldn't put anything permanent on those cards anyways as they are RAM and the possibility of the battery going dead while your computer is unplugged means all is lost. RAM is still too volatile to use as a storage medium. It would be nice for a page file storage unit but for what you describe, I don't trust it.
 
Originally posted by: bluestrobe
The PCI buss might handle data transfer to one card but would probably overloaded running four/five cards at once. I wouldn't put anything permanent on those cards anyways as they are RAM and the possibility of the battery going dead while your computer is unplugged means all is lost. RAM is still too volatile to use as a storage medium. It would be nice for a page file storage unit but for what you describe, I don't trust it.
Click to expand...

Well, it wouldn't be difficult to set a backup program to automatically back up files from the drives periodically. You could even stick a 20gb drive in there and have Norton Ghost clone the boot drive to it daily. Also, I'm not sure if the PCI bus has anything to do with data transfer since the cards are connected via an SATA cable.
 
A little price shopping makes the cost a little more swallowable:

Gigabyte ramdisk - $125 @ Buy.com, times 4 units = $500
Corsair 1gb - $67 @ Crucial.com, times 16 units = $1072

So like ~$1572 plus the normal system cost. Hrm...
 
For a gamer it is not worth the money, games hardly use the hard drive after a level loads, I suppose the ram drive might help with level loading, but you will be hard pressed to find a modern game that is less than 4GB in size, and additionally to gamers FPS is king... put the money into a better graphics card.

For a professional graphics person, it might be worth it, but only on a case by case basis. For a photoshop scratch file, the iRam would be perfect, but you would really have to be using large files and doing this for a business to really even consider.

Right now I think they are fun toys, but no real cost effective application for the masses. Unless your livelyhood depends on photoshop and your current computer is inadequate, dont bother.
 
Originally posted by: bluestrobe
The PCI buss might handle data transfer to one card but would probably overloaded running four/five cards at once. I wouldn't put anything permanent on those cards anyways as they are RAM and the possibility of the battery going dead while your computer is unplugged means all is lost. RAM is still too volatile to use as a storage medium. It would be nice for a page file storage unit but for what you describe, I don't trust it.
Click to expand...

They don't use the PCI bus..they use a SATA connection, the PCI slot just gives it power.
 
Originally posted by: stevty2889

They don't use the PCI bus..they use a SATA connection, the PCI slot just gives it power.
Click to expand...

Forgot about that. Been about 2-3 months since I last looked at these.

 
Originally posted by: dwcal
IMHO, the Intel Robson cache looks more promising. It's simpler and accomplishes many of the same things like speeding up OS boot.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060314-6376.html
Click to expand...

That looks pretty neat! To be honest, I spend most of my time on IRC or surfing the web, so a system like this would get wasted on me. If I had the cash, I'd invest in 3 Raptor 150 drives (2 mirrored in raid, 1 for a nightly ghost clone of those drives) and spend the leftover on a 4800+ and a 512mb 7900gtx or something. Oh well, it's fun to talk about 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Kaido
A little price shopping makes the cost a little more swallowable:

Gigabyte ramdisk - $125 @ Buy.com, times 4 units = $500
Corsair 1gb - $67 @ Crucial.com, times 16 units = $1072

So like ~$1572 plus the normal system cost. Hrm...
Click to expand...



Don't you think it will be far better just to get a real SSD drive with that amount. I'm not sure about the pricing but a 60GB SSD cost around $2K. And this drives are the non-volatile type rams which requires no battery to keep the data. Text
 
Originally posted by: biostud
Originally posted by: bluestrobe
Originally posted by: Kaido
Is that flash drive as fast as the gigabyte ramdisk though?
Click to expand...

You're still limited to the SATA150 standard though.
Click to expand...

it's really wierd they didn't use the SATA300 standard
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It wasn't around when they started making these from what I recall. These have been around for a bit but very low in popularity due to the cost to storage ratio.
 
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