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RAMDRIVE: Worth it? Or waste of money.

A

Aarondeep

Golden Member
I was snoopin around newegg and saw this baby, imagine putting your games on this puppy and loading it up from there.
Or moving your page file to this.

Will I see any performance difference? What is the best way to utilize this type of device?
GIGABYTE I-RAM LINK

NEWEGG LINK
 
Anandtech has a review of it here

The card is $129 on Newegg. If you have a few older DDR sticks lying around that you don't use, you can pop them in there. Anandtech's review shows that the card is 3-6 times faster than the WD 74GB Raptor they compared it to, depending on what you're doing.

A defining factor of hard drive performance are the seek times. Since solid state RAM seeks very quickly, it's much faster. The card's interface is SATA so the limit is 1.5Gb/s. I would think that things that access that solid state storage more randomly would run faster.
 
After reading the article, seems like a waste of money. I think ill just upgrade to 2GB of ram instead of that thing.
 
Worth it in limited circumstances, but probably not any that would benefit a 'normal' desktop user.

In situations where you need more than 4GB of effective RAM, you can put your swapfile/Photoshop scratch file/other temp storage on one and get a speed boost that way. If you're running a small database or webserver, you can cache data to it, or possibly store all your data on it if the amount of data being served is not that big (although you would have to sync it up with nonvolatile storage regularly).

Essentially, if you have less than 4GB of RAM already, it's better to just add RAM. It's not really cost-effective to use it as a boot drive.
 
Originally posted by: aarondeep
Will I see any performance difference?
What is the best way to utilize this type of device?
Click to expand...
A. You will see fantastic performance out of this "drive"
B. Load your OS on it.

BTW, "Cost effectiveness" and "performance" are different issues. :laugh:
 
Always the first to load in BF2... priceless 😉

Actually, I'm oft first and always amongst the first to load with a lowly DM10 and 1GB RAM but then the average schmuck's drive prolly ain't defragilated and/or they are peaking beyond physical thanks to a bunch of background crap.
 
Gigabite is supposed to release the version 2 in Febuary.

It supports SATA 3.0GB/s and DDR2 (w/ up to 16GB of ram).

It will be expensive to load it up... but still much less than enterprise class solid state drives.
 
Sure, you could run your OS off of it and watch windows boot quickly, but you're going to be hard pressed to run both windows and the game of your choice. Save your money, 150GB raptor for $300 has plenty of space and won't cost you an arm and a leg.
 
Originally posted by: Matthias99
Worth it in limited circumstances, but probably not any that would benefit a 'normal' desktop user.

In situations where you need more than 4GB of effective RAM, you can put your swapfile/Photoshop scratch file/other temp storage on one and get a speed boost that way.
Click to expand...

Yep, I was thinking this would be great for your Photoshop scratch file. For most of us though, way to expensive.
 
These things have been around forever in other forms. Sure, the Platypus Technology QikDATA was bottlenecked by the PCI bus (It didn't connect to the board as a drive) but it supported 8GB of super-cheap (at the time) SDRAM. It appeared as an INT13 drive (ala RAID array/SCSI).
 
I gotta admit the 2.0 version looks very very promising if what you are saying is true and about the feb release. It would definately be in my next build...

It would be insanely fast...
 
I'm surprised by the lack of performance increase in games. I always had the impression that the hard drive was the slowest component. In any case, it seems pretty useless. Why would it be more beneficial in Photoshop? Can't you just put more RAM on your mainboard?
 
Originally posted by: wpeng
I'm surprised by the lack of performance increase in games. I always had the impression that the hard drive was the slowest component. In any case, it seems pretty useless. Why would it be more beneficial in Photoshop? Can't you just put more RAM on your mainboard?
Click to expand...

You can. But when you load up a file, it still loads from HDD to ram, and the bottleneck is the HDD. If you put your frequently used photoshop files on the RAM DRIVE, then when it reads into memory, it'll be much quicker.

I think the limitation in games is due to SATA, it's just not fast enough to take full advantage of it. I think with SATA II, we'll see a significant increase in performance.
 
Originally posted by: wpeng
I'm surprised by the lack of performance increase in games. I always had the impression that the hard drive was the slowest component.
Click to expand...

Well, it is, but games also spend a lot of time doing things like uncompressing textures, building data structures in memory, etc. while loading levels. If the game is well-coded enough to use asynchronous I/O to begin with, it probably isn't spending *that* much time waiting on data from the disk, and so there are diminishing returns from a faster drive in terms of loading levels in a game (or any complex application). Also, as noted above, moving it to a 300MBps interface may provide somewhat more of a benefit.

Why would it be more beneficial in Photoshop? Can't you just put more RAM on your mainboard?
Click to expand...

Like I said:

In situations where you need more than 4GB of effective RAM...
Click to expand...

IMO, there's very little point to it with less than 4GB of RAM already installed. If you've maxed out your RAM and you are still swapping to disk (which is very possible using Photoshop if you work with many big images at once, or you have multiple content creation applications open), using an SSD as swap/scratch space could be very helpful. It could also be really good as a scratch disk for video editing. But the benefits for an average user are slim.
 
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