iRAM is moving too slow we need to replace hard disk drives!

[MNOB07]

Standard hard drives have decidedly progressed far and keep pushing for higher and higher capacities with smaller varieties for smaller devices. However would I be wrong in saying that it may be the most critical yet oldest technology in our systems? In addition hdds have moving parts, are noisy, give off unnecessesary heat due to platters spinning, are fragile especially when turned on, and are like one big bottleneck with throughput getting kicked out of the door when instructed to read nonsequential data such as requests when loading apps, searching, boot up, or heaven forbid the page file.

Don't get me wrong modern hard drives are great, but after iRAM was released we saw unprecedented performance on desktops with no moving parts, zero noise, and no worries about overheating, but why must we use expensive system RAM?

PC66 has a theoretical throughput of 533 MB/sec, isn't that enough for SATA2? What should happen is a company find the cheapest way to produce the "slowest" RAM < PC66 speeds and at high capacities; an entry level "ramdrive" should be a total of 32GB.

 

[Lord Banshee]

I agree. maybe not the pc66 part. It is by far biggest bottleneck.. There are videos around with iRAM loading windows and all i got to say is DAMN!

If it had 32GB like you stated, and didn't cost more than 250 dollars i would buy that over a raptor any day. I really don't think anyone needs more tahn 32GB for System Drive. I have plenty of CAD apps and 3-4 games installed on my Drive system drive and not breaking 40GB.

Too bad i don't think this will happen anytime soon as Hard-Drive companys are introduceing new tech whcih only help 1-2% of the problem (hybrid and perpendictual drives).

 

[l Xes l]

i totally agree... hard drives are the most lagging part in the computer industry...

 

[mb]

As far as PC66 goes, it may not be any bit cheaper since AFAIK they no longer make it. I don't know if it is still true today as I don't really feel like looking, but last time I did check 512mb of PC133 cost more than 512mb of DDR or DDR2.
But I do see your point. The RAM for these things doesn't have to be the quickest out there.

 

[IdaGno]

it aint iRAM but it's as fast as RAM - then again, the idea is as yet unproven & definitely all wet

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/0/E...0448AA09FCC25717A0019D2CC?OpenDocument

Wet future for storage predicted as disks reach limits

News

Nanowires suspended in water could be the foundation of a breakthrough in storage capacity, but the technology hasn?t been proven yet.

 

[Lord Banshee]

Originally posted by: IdaGno
it aint iRAM but it's as fast as RAM - then again, the idea is as yet unproven & definitely all wet

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/0/E...0448AA09FCC25717A0019D2CC?OpenDocument

Wet future for storage predicted as disks reach limits

News

Nanowires suspended in water could be the foundation of a breakthrough in storage capacity, but the technology hasn?t been proven yet.

If this does prove itself in the retail market, it will be another 10+ years. Does sound cool though.

 

[Ika]

there are several possibilities that have the potential to replace hard drives. iRAM, IMHO, is too proprietary and has too little future room to improve. the future, i believe, is in solid state flash disks and NAND flash. small sizes, quick access times, and now increasing sizes makes it a winner.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: guoziming
there are several possibilities that have the potential to replace hard drives. iRAM, IMHO, is too proprietary and has too little future room to improve. the future, i believe, is in solid state flash disks and NAND flash. small sizes, quick access times, and now increasing sizes makes it a winner.

I'm waiting to see what happens with the PQI 64GB SSD. Sustained transfer rate on the soon forthcoming SSDs by PQI and Samsung isn't the greatest (though acces times are phenomenal as you said), but putting two of them in RAID 0 should solve that... mmm

 

[T9D]

I'm buying an i-ram and 2- 4 solid state drives in raid. Set that up right and it should be amazing. (when the price is reasonable). For now I'm getting an i-ram to compliment my raptor. As it is now irams are just to dangerous for important data to totally replace regular hard drives (besides having so little comparable storage and more expensive).

I think if they can get an Iram and SSD to work together or come together in one harddrive then thats the future.

 

[T9D]

oops double post

 

[Noubourne]

I'd like to see a couple gigs of RAM embedded onto a hard drive with some sort of controller to temporarily store writes to the solid state RAM, and then transfer them over to the disk while you're doing other stuff. Eventually it could be half solid state, and half disk storage, with all the most used proggys on the solid state partition or whatever. iRam is nice if you've got a lot of RAM laying around and you like to ghost your install often, but if it's not backed up properly it's just going to waste time forcing constant reinstalls of your OS and apps.

 

[acole1]

Originally posted by: Noubourne
I'd like to see a couple gigs of RAM embedded onto a hard drive with some sort of controller to temporarily store writes to the solid state RAM, and then transfer them over to the disk while you're doing other stuff. Eventually it could be half solid state, and half disk storage, with all the most used proggys on the solid state partition or whatever. iRam is nice if you've got a lot of RAM laying around and you like to ghost your install often, but if it's not backed up properly it's just going to waste time forcing constant reinstalls of your OS and apps.

Like some sort of controller that feeds the data in the i-RAM to the hard disk or SSD when it gets free time.

In this case it would alow the RAM to do all the heavy lifting, and just have the HD or SSD as a backup incase the RAM loses power. This is kind of like what they are doing with hybrid HD's, but Hybrid HD's dont claim faster speeds... just less disk thrashing.

 

[wwswimming]

a few years ago i commented to a co-worker that i wished i had a 5GB flash drive.
the response was, "oh, yeah, right".

well, i'm pretty sure they're out now.

i think a solid state hard drive is going to be available in the next year or 2,
supplemented by "old fashioned" hard drive technology.

by available, i mean being able to buy it at Newegg for $200 or less and
then load your OS and some aps on it.

 

[PhoenixOrion]

SATA SSD

 

[SparkyJJO]

I wonder about flashcard type devices. If they can stick 4GB on 1" x 1" CF card then surely in the physical space that a typical HD takes they could get enough storage for a main system drive. And with those getting faster and faster I think that could end up being pretty good. They are a lot more durable too - try dropping a HD on the floor a couple times and see if it still works

 

[imported_rod]

Flash would be good. It isn't as fast as RAM, but it's way faster than a mechanical HDD. And you don't need to keep it powered to keep all the data.

A device like iRAM that used SD or CF flash memory would be awesome.

RoD

 

[Jiggz]

Early next year Samsung will release the 32GB SSD using NAND rams. This requires not back up power to retain the data. But it's still expensive although within reach. For the meantime, I wish Gigabyte will just lower the price of the I-RAM2(when released) which is capable of 8GB using 4-2GB sticks. With 2 of this you should have enough disk space for OS and application.

 

[Pariah]

Not if you plan on using Vista:

"The Aero ready one will need a 1GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor, 1GB of system memory, 128MB of graphics memory, 40GB of hard drive capacity with 15GB free space, a DVD-ROM drive, audio output capabilities and Internet access."

The vast majority of flash memory is incredibly slow and along with the limited number of writes makes it a no go as a HD replacement. The near term future is hybrid drives, though it looks like you will need to be using Vista to take advantage of the all the onboard memory. The standard HD is not getting replaced anytime soon, certainly not for mass storage. We will not be seeing terabyte+ SSD drives anytime in the forseeable future.

 

[BirdDad]

Flash is too unreliable,it gets bad sectors after only a few hundred thousand writes.I would say get 2 Iram 2s and stick them on a SATA 2 RAID(that way you would see improvement in throughput even though it is a SATA1 device).
Does anyone know when the Iram 2 will be out?

 

[letdown427]

Given how much smaller a flash card is than a harddrive, why not just incorporate say 10 flash cards inside a box the same size as a hard disk, and build in RAID 0 across all of them. It'd have a reasonable amount of space, and all that RAID would improve transfer speeds.

Add into taht a simple algorithm to stop the same sectors being used over and over (i.e spread the writes around the flash cards, to try to hold off bad sectors) and there you have it!

Perhaps a touch on the expensive side though

Given how much money is being invested into research of hard disk technologies (nanotube lubricant anyone?) it doesn't seem like manufactureres are quite ready to drop hard disks just yet.

 

[zephyrprime]

Real PC66 would be a lot more expensive to produce nowadays than ddr2-800 even if you ignore the startup costs!

A slower, cheaper sort of ram is possible however but it would not be cheap enough by a longshot.

Look, people have been using ramdrives forever. The iRAM is not a new or innovative product it is actually just a rehash of a product type who's popularity faded when windows came around and broke the DOS 1MB barrier. Despite ramdrives being as old as they are, the harddrive/ram cost ratio is essentially the same as it has always been so ram drives are not economically feasible for widespread use.

Our only hope right now is multilayer Flash. (by the way, people always talk about how slow flash is but flash can be really fast if there is a market for it.)