The State of Solid State Storage

carlmenezes writes "Pretty much every time a faster CPU is released, there are always a few that are marveled by the rate at which CPUs get faster but loathe the sluggish rate that storage evolves. Recognizing the allure of solid state storage, especially to performance-conscious enthusiast users, Gigabyte went about creating the first affordable solid state storage device, and they called it i-RAM. Would you pay $100 for a 4GB Solid State Drive that is up to 6x faster than a WD Raptor?"

Let me think.

[gandell]

Would you pay $100 for a 4GB Solid State Drive that is up to 6x faster than a WD Raptor?

Nope. I'd rather wait longer and have more capacity for less money. After all, I use Windows as my primary OS. I'm used to waiting.

Truthfully, though, if the price came down, I'd be interested in this for a Windows install, and then install all my apps and save all my docs to an external IDE.

Nope

[Asicath]

Not if its called an iRam.

RamDrive, FlashDrive, etc. are all appropriate names, but iRam? Could the product name be any less descriptive?

Re:No Way!

[Bimo_Dude]

Agreed. It seems to me that there is still a loooooong way to go with SS storage. IMHO, the people who would need this kind of speed are likely to be editing a lot of video (or some other system-intensive stuff), so therefore would also need tons of storage.

That being said, I do like the idea, and when they have something that's 300GB+ and solid state, I'd be happy to pay a few hundred dollars for it. It would be quite useful for a media system.

I'll take it!

[freeze128]

I have several machines around the office that are just fine, but have defective hard drives. This is because Dell ships the crappiest hard drives they can find (Quantum). The machines are NOT new and fast, but they run the applications that I need them to just fine. When a hard disk goes bad, I find it difficult to install a 40GB hard disk, when all I need is a couple of gigs. Some of these machines won't even support a hard drive > 30GB.

A small capacity flash drive is just what I need in this application. I would prefer that the price for a 4GB model come down a bit though. With the solid-state hard drives, these machines could last another 5-6 years!

Surely!

[Bin_jammin]

I'd consider buying it if I were building a system that needed some fast write speed... maybe video capture. Be neato if I could get a few and stripe 'em.

Yes, for the OS

[mindaktiviti]

I'd love to have a super quick HD for the OS because it's accessed more frequently than, say, some old data file you haven't touched in over a year.

Music, movies, documents, pictures - I don't think these need to be on solid state drives, because they're accessed just fine (except moving GB's of files still needs to be faster), but things like the OS and applications would seem to run a lot quicker if they would all be in ram-like storage.

Darn straight I would/will!

[Just Some Guy]

FreeBSD allows you to allocate a dynamically resizable filesystem out of swap (see: md, mfs). I'm thinking of mounting the whole thing as a super-fast swap partition - basically, as a giant L4 cache - and mounting /tmp and a few other speed-critical filesystems out of there.

Mmmm, hyper-fast builds that don't depend on the latency of moving parts...

triple setup (RAM + SSHD + HD)

[cyclomedia]

could be useful for a triple setup, use your ram and hd as you normally would but all the crap that windows usually sticks in the vcache and swap file could be stashed on the Solid State drive. you could then feasibly dump your ram state into it when doing a shutdown and have an instant "reboot" but as the standard HD still has everything on it if the battery backup fails then you can still do a standard boot. if you use it as a speedy ramdisk too you could build a redundancy setup on your standard HD that mirrors it, (albeit not in real time, obviously) keeping your frequently accessed documents and suchlike to hand but also safe from said power failures

What happened to Ramdrive?

[El_Smack]

Back in the DOS 5 and 6 days, I used to make an 8 meg ramdrive, copy the X-wing game files to that and run from there. No load times for the cut scenes or new missions, and I still had 8 meg to use for regular memory. X-wing only used 4 meg with all the options, so as long as I could get 620K free I was good to go.

Would I pay $100 for this?

[Coocha]

Before I RTFA, I would have said YES! But it looks like it uses PCI only for power; all data transfer is done over SATA-bus, which becomes the speed bottleneck at something around 150 Mbit/sec. Since that's the case, I don't see why they made it a PCI card at all... I assume the FPGA and the DDR memory require low-voltage power not offered by a normal hard-drive-style 12V molex connector. Meh.

It just seems to me that the card itself is very bulky, and a similarly-priced RAMdisk with greater storage and a better form-factor is just waiting to be implemented. Oh, and it's not 4GB RAMdisk for $100, b/c you have to purchase the DDR as well :/

Re:No Way!

[peculiarmethod]

I don't agree. I record music on at least 8 tracks at a time into a single cpu. I NEED higher transfer rates. If it's 4 gigs, thats enough to keep it recording without a drop in an entire days worth of recording. Then I can dump all that data to a slower, larger drive. It may not fit everyone's needs.. but this is PERFECT for me.

Drive speed not the limiter

[Red Flayer]

The i-RAM only uses SATA for data interface... if I recall, SATA is limited to about 150 MB/sec. Raptor speed is 72 MB/sec. Where is the 6x coming from?

Other bottlenecks are sure to limit this (CPU, etc).

Until I see a way to make this actually very useful (other than having one modern game on it to get better fps), there's no way I would buy at that price.

Volatility

[acb]

The main problem (other than the limited capacity and price) is the volatility. It has a battery pack, though if the power is out for more than 16 hours (or less, as the battery ages), it loses its entire contents. Which is somewhat precarious.

A better idea would have been to have a bank of Flash EEPROM built onto the card as a backup device, with loss of power triggering the automatic dumping of RAM contents to Flash, and resumption of power repopulating RAM from Flash on demand/during idle time. Given that it is now possible to fit 4Gb in a Compact Flash card, there is little excuse for not having such a backup subsystem.

And other uses...

[Just Some Guy]

Alternatively:

• A place to put your reiser/ext3/database server journals
• /var/tmp for Gentoo users (same idea as my first FreeBSD thoughts)
• Mailserver/newsserver spools (depending on how much you trust it)

Yeah, I think I might have to snag a couple of these.

Incredibly useful

[NineNine]

On a sidenote, is anyone going to buy this drive that is 4gb and costs 100 bucks? I don't think it's much use to anyone.

In the era of cheap, throwaway crap, I'm pretty much by myself when I say "I want QUALITY". So yes, I'm planning on buying several of these later today to put them in my main machines in my business. they'll be running our mission-critical cash registers.

Non-Technical Users Don't Understand

[bigtallmofo]

Anyone that says this isn't worth it is not very technical in my book.

An affordable 4 GB is fantastic for this kind of thing. Use your imagination:

1. Imagine how fast your system would be installed on a battery-backed up RAM drive.
2. Imagine how fast your system would be with your memory swap file installed on this.
3. Imagine how fast your database server would be with its transaction log installed on this. Hey, throw the tempdb (for SQL Server) on there as well.
4. Many other things.

If you're thinking of this as a standard hard drive to store your DivX movies and MP3 files, you're not thinking right. Solid state drives are miracles that can speed up systems beyond anything you would expect.

We were doing something like this 11+ years ago...

[g2racer]

It all depends on the application. I remember 11+ years ago I was a developer on the NY state tax processing project. We were using Sun Sparc 20s connected to Kodak 923D scanners to scan tax returns at a very high rate (something like 72 pages per minute duplex), the barcode information obtained from the tax returns was used to move the returns into a workflow process and the images were copied from a local filesystem over to massive (at the time) fileservers. HD's at the time (even the fastest SCSI drives available) were not able to keep up with the scanner writing the barcode info and images, our custom app processing the information, and moving the images to the filesystem. Our only alternative was to use a "RAM" disk. We stuffed our Sparc 20s will all the memory they could hold (512MB) and created a 256MB filesystem in RAM. We used a thirdparty ramdisk software product for the first release which ran on SunOS 4, but Sun actually implemented a pretty slick ramdisk with Solaris 2 which we used the following year. Benchmarks at the time found that these ramdisks were some 20+x the speed of HDs of that era. I'm suprised that the Gigabyte card is only 6x faster than a HD. You'd figure it'd be more, but I guess they are using SATA as the means through which to get to the "drive", so it may be hitting some physical limitation based on the interface... I wonder if it'd be more cost effective and faster to stick an extra 4GB of memory onto the motherboard and setup a ramdisk device similar to what we had on the Sparcs... Sure it wouldn't survive reboot, but it should only be a hair slower than reading and writing from RAM itself!

Dubious design - power up when removed

[panurge]

Power consumption goes up when it is removed from the PCI slot, says the article. If that's so, there is a design fault somewhere - it suggests that there are floating inputs .

Re:New Tech

[cavemanf16]

You could almost put the core WinXP on this thing WITH a swap partition and then use your HDD's exclusively for storing external programs and data. WinXP breaks? Wipe Solid State Drive and reinstall. Drivers and the kernel all get really fast access to the CPU without involving moving parts while less used programs and data files reside on big HDD's. For a gaming PC I can see this as a definitely viable tech. I would buy it myself if 4GB of DDR RAM came with it... but alas that adds another $400 to the purchase price.

no database test....

[da5idnetlimit.com]

SATA2 is not yet provided, and it's true I was wondering about getting 300MB/s from a ram module that is quite capable of that.

I thought that, maybe, the FPGA they use cannot reach such a performance yet, and it could come with next revision, when they produce their own package from end to end.

I was more wondering about some tests missing using databases.

What better test than a database, say for a small website, with few modifications to the base and the biggest problem being that hdds are a latency hell when the db is waiting for the data to be unstored....

Under linux, I know I can easily script the partioning at each reboot, and have another script syncing the db to a hdd say every 5 minutes (x% of a max 4 gigs db @10MB/s writing speed... , syncing only the last 5 minutes journal... largely possible if your are not running a Enterprise class website...)

What would be the results of this test, aka a db with almost no latency and 100MB/s bandwith ?

Wouldn't that have been more intersting than using it as a pagefile ?

Re:No Way!

[Retric]

4Gigs at 20MB/s will fill up in a little over 3min 20 seconds.

Now most HDD will do 20MB/s so either this is going to be to small or a normal HDD is going to work fine for you. Anyway look into getting a 4+ disk RAID 5 array. I got one for 800$ that can store 900Gigs and can do something like 50MB/s transfers.

PS: What this disk is going to be great for is non-sequential storage. If you work with 30+ tracks you either need to have a lot of buffer / ram space (So you can store up lots of info then put it to disk.) or a non-sequential storage system.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Non-Technical Users Don't Understand

[CaptnMArk]

> it is also true that in this situation you can just turn off the windows swap file and everything will stay in memory and run very well.

I do this all the time (it makes windows tolerably fast). You do get a strange "out of memory" warning when the memory is about half full.

It might be memory overcommit which is a problem under Linux too.

Re:No Way!

[iamhassi]

"that is up to 6x faster than a WD Raptor?"

OK WTF??

Again, from the freaking article:
"Armed with a 64-bit memory controller and DDR200 memory, the i-RAM should be capable of transferring data at up to 1.6GB/s to the Xilinx chip; however, the actual transfer rate to your system is bottlenecked by the SATA bus. The i-RAM currently implements the SATA150 spec, giving it a maximum transfer rate of 150MB/s."

Someone please explain what's going on here?? Did the person that wrote the description EVEN READ THE FRICKIN ARTICLE?? 150MB/s is no where near 6x faster! Modern SATA drives easily get 80MB/s, so how is 150MB/s "up to 6x faster"??

IMHO this seems to be the biggest waste of money ever. For much cheaper I could RAID 0 two SATA drives and get the same transfer rate and have 100x more storage.

Even the article proves it:
Game Level Load Time Comparison (Lower is Better)
_________________Splinter Cell: CT___Doom 3___Battlefield 2
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)_______8.0s__19.6s__20.83s
Western Digital Raptor (74GB) 10.59s__25.78s__25.67s

wow, so for $500+ I can load Battlefield 2 five seconds faster?!? Yeah, that's worth it :rollseyes:

Re:Let me think.

[Sarojin]

It's only used for power, which is lame - they should have used a regular SATA power plug and made this thing the size of a 3.5" disk.