iRam iRam II and some others

[Stiganator]

I saw the iRam at microcenter the other day. First time I had ever seen one. Made me wonder what ever happened the iRam II? It was supposed to be DDR2 8GB. It also reminded me of another company that was making a PCI or PCIe flash/ram card that had 100,000+ I/O. Anyone know what company that was?

 

[Lorne]

Never seen the DDR2 or 8gig version or info, What Ive seen as the difference between Iram and Iram II is that Iram II fits in a 5.25 drive bay while the Iram sits in a PCI slot.
Both are identical otherwise.
Stats are 4 gigs in 4 DDR slots that can use DDR1600-DDR3200, RAM speed makes no difference in performance, Just use what you have laying around.
SATA connection.

Gigabyte Iram aand Iram II, On average $130 USD
Its a modular 4gig max battery backed SATA SSD for those that dont know.

I read that most owners use it for there pagedrive, Ive also seen it tested in many ways, Even in raid and boot drive.

 

[sutahz]

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm

Supposed to be better. It's definatly more expensive.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: sutahz
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm

Supposed to be better. It's definatly more expensive.

Ya that's the one I think Lorne was referring to, the HyperDrive4.

I've also looked into these recently with SSDs and Gigabyte's iRAM. Unfortunately it looks as if iRAM 2 has been postponed indefinitely, but it would've made a very compelling product right now with DDR2 being so cheap and increased capacities. I believe the iRAM is limited to DDR and only 4GB, which isn't quite enough or useful for today's games. It was fast however, very close to the fastest SSDs on the market now. I'd love to see how an iRAM 2 with DDR2 up to 16GB would perform, but I also think hybrid solutions like this or SSD will end up bridging the gap between current memory limitations on motherboards and the memory/storage requirements of the future.

 

[Lorne]

I didnt know about the Hyperdrive untill now, That artical is also 6yrs now to, Its a wonder why it didnt come up durring my SSD serches.

There are 2 Gigabyte Iram's, Both work identically except there physical designe, One is a PCI card and the Iram II is a 5.25 drivebay style, You can find them both on Ebay but I havent found but also not looked very hard at finding any documentaion on the drivebay version.

DD2 wouldnt improve anything except possibly price and actualy hinder the drive more as DDR2 latencies are higher (Not that it is of any noticable significant), The speed limitaion is still in the drive controlboard and SATA port you hook it to, DDR1600 can still flood a SATA and SATA2 controller.

 

[sutahz]

True DDR2 wouldnt help performance but it would help w/ cost as DDR1 is awefully expensive comparativly. Lets take the PC3200 standard. 3200MB/s theoretically, about 2500MB/s realistically, SATA2 is only 300MB/s.... and you're saying DDR1600? ((([2500MB/s]/2)/2)/2)=312.5MB/s=(PC3200/2/2/2=PC400, theoretically). Latencies would not be an issue at this point, I wouldn't imagine.