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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?"
I remember seeing this sort of thing way back in the DOS days. Battery backed RAM on an ISA card. Product died out because RAM was more expensive than HD.
As the other reply mentioned, it's an SATA drive so limited to 150MB/s (100MB/s in practice). The latency is very low, yes, but that's not the only factor. There is only so much you can do with double the bandwidth, no matter how low the latency is.
I also wonder if the benchmarks were done with drive caches on or off. I would imagine that this drive would be faster with caches off. With what might as well be zero latency on disk accesses, the benefit of a cache is lost; reading ahead probably will only waste bandwidth reading stuff we may not need.
I'm very disappointed that the article didn't mention SATA2 (300MB/s), which is already available in most new motherboards. With double the bandwidth it would have made a big difference. It's very likely the device doesn't support SATA2. However the Anandtech article makes NO MENTION at all of SATA2, not even to the point of saying "We'd like to see this drive with SATA2 support."
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...
This doesn't make sense. I suspect that you were misled by the incorrect summary. You don't get 4GB of solid state storage for $100.-. That would actually be a really good deal. All you get is a card which has SATA on one side and RAM slots on the other side.
So instead of buying this card you could take the $100 towards a motherboard that supports > 4GB of RAM. Then the RAM will be sitting on a bus that can actually sustain datarates WAY higher than SATA.
Since you don't need persistent storage for cache it makes little sense to stick it on a bus that can theoretically do, what, 150 MB/s? When you can stick it on a bus which can do several GB/s.
I don't really see the point of this card, since it will only keep the data for 16 hours if not powered. In other words, if you leave for a weekend and for some reason the power to your PC is turned off, your tough out of luck.
Other cards that I have seen in the past that make more sense, actually have a normal drive for persistent storage. If power fails, there's enough backup power to write everything to disk. That's basically like having cache on the disk equal to the size of the disk.
Bottom line; this is a rehash of what's been done many times before, didn't really take off then, and considering a relatively stupid implementation, probably won't take off now.