Gigabyte Solid-State Storage Reviewed

EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has a review of Gigabyte's i-RAM, a relatively affordable solid-state storage device that uses plain old DDR memory modules and plugs into a standard motherboard PCI slot and Serial ATA port. Performance is generally excellent and occasionally jaw-dropping, but the i-RAM's appeal is ultimately curbed by its slower Serial ATA interface and limited capacity. Still, it's an interesting solution for anyone looking for faster I/O, and since it behaves like a normal hard drive without the need for drivers or software, it should work with just about any operating system."

Comments

Not seeing the target market.

[Godeke]

An interesting idea, but the limited size (4GB) makes me wonder what the target market would be. More to the point, where would this solution be better than 4GB of RAM available to the platform? Yes, this thing has battery backup and sips power when the machine is off, so it acts somewhat like a drive, but I would have my doubts about trusting it with anything mission critical.

The performance tests show it did a great job as a high performance drive for simultanious requests for data on a web server, for example. But they didn't compare it to using the same 4GB onboard the server, which would be far more interesting... since the data is being "read" over a Serial ATA (which is puzzling since they are plugged into the bus), I can't imagine it being faster than using the memory to cache the data traditionally. The other examples, such as operating system boot time show that the operating system isn't read bound as much as one would think on boot.

I'm sure there are some specialist uses for this that will make sense, but I suspect most of them would be better served with 4GB of RAM disk or cache.

Swapping/Caching

[Twillerror]

This sounds like a perfect candidate for a swap partion, especially on Windows. Windows swap is a huge performance hog. I turn it off if the machine has 2 gigs+ of memory. Windows tends to swap memory not based on the lack of it, but the lack of access. So if you let a program sit in the background over night and then switch to it your HD goes crazy.

With swap being on this you'd still get transfer rate problems, but access rates should be extremely higher. Especially when the "drive" is fragmented. A defrag program would run pretty fast on one of these as well.

It is to bad that OSs don't have support for these types of devices yet. I'd rather use it as an actual drive cache and not bother my main RAM. If the OS loaded a file up it could place it on the RAM drive and read and write to it.

Related, most of my servers at work have 128 or 256 meg SCSI RAID cards. I wish that technique would make it into the retail market.

Re:Why use ATA at all?

[networkBoy]

You would need drivers for a storage device on PCIe. If you just made this look like a PCI host controller it would boot fine (natively and without drivers). What do you think that PCI card that comes with your UDMA133 hard drive is for? Adding second drives? no. It is so if your mainboard only supports UDMA66/100 you can boot from the faster PCI card instead. This would be no different. As long as you're tying up the slot and are using a friggen Spartan 3 FPGA you might as well make use of the things PCI controller.

As a later poster stated this is good for you to connect to your RAID controller, but I see issues with that as well (namely four of these and you may not have any more PCI slots available).

I'd like to see a stand-alone unit that fits a 3.5 inch bay and has a pair of power connectors, one for connecting to standard system power, the other to connect to an optional PCI card that gives you the trickle power you need to keep the memory alive when the system is off.

I personally would love to use a couple of these in a stripe set as a video scratch disk.
-nB

Re:But the on-board battery only runs for 10 hours

[petermgreen]

only if you actually pull the plug. as long as the standby power feed to the board is on it should be fine.

10 hours is plenty enough to reset the tripped breaker or start up a generator when the power failure alarm goes off.

Link to Gigabyte's page

[b1t r0t]

The article apparently only links to Gigabyte's home page, and if they do have a deeper link, I couldn't find it.

So here is a link to their Other Peripherals page, where they list all three (!) versions of the board. But you still can't order directly from them anyhow.

Re:Why use ATA at all?

[Zeio]

SATA is 150MB/sec. Standard PCI is (32 * 33) / 8 = 132 (and generally * 0.8 for overhead if other things are present on the bus so more like just around 100).

You should say use a single PCI-Express lane, 500MB/sec.

Seriously, look into things before your post - especially when using snarky expressions such as "pray tell"

Also, direct connect to the PCI bus would require (most likely) funky drivers.

IDEALLY, marvell/adaptec/lsi or others should just have a back end to one of the common non-fakeraid controllers they make be RAM instead of disks, piggybacking the existing driver support for the raid cards.

I have bought one and reviewers obviously haven't.

[millisa]

I read about these a while ago and have bought one.

Just like every single other review I've read, great things are claimed about this thing that "Its just like a hard drive" "Linux! Wee!" yadda yadda yadda.

I question whether most these reviewers actually touched one.

I have version 1.2 of the board.
I had four 512meg pc2700 dimms laying around (kingston) which I figured I'd try it out with. It seemed to work at first, detected in the bios, has the right size on autodetect.

I was able to format it once in Windows XP after initializing it. I have never successfully formatted it since. The data corrupted itself shortly thereafter. (I copied an iso back and forth from a standard sata disk and md5'd it.)

The speed was impressive. Copying to itself from itself did about 500mb in 5-7 seconds.

Now, the use in windows has some appeal (sql temp db? IIS cache / IIS compression dir?) but I really wanted this for some of my mail servers (spam scanners that need a fairly big glob of temp space) and possibly for some replicated mysql dbs.

I could not get any of the following linux installs to recognize that there was a disk on the system at sda or hda: fedora (core4), centos (4.2), ubuntu (um, whatever the iso is they have up). However, this was *only* during the installation process . . . I do not know what driver these installs might have needed that would allow it to see this device (they see a maxtor sata drive I have on hand just fine). If I installed onto a regular old sata hard drive, and turned off all PATA ports, I was able to see the I-Ram. I was able to fdisk the I-ram. I was able to mkfs.ext3 the i-ram, sort of... The smaller partitions seemed to go ok, but whenever I made a partition bigger than 200meg, sometimes mkfs would crap out throwing errors about the partition being possibly corrupt.

I was able to successfully install a 100meg fat partition, with dos on it and it worked quite well...

Now, because I was getting corruption and not using one of the suggested ram types, I purchased 4 1gig sticks of the exact model and chipset they listed as being tested (kingston kvf400x64c3a/1g).
This did not change any of the weirdness.

Now, I firmly believe this product works. I can't see them selling it if it didn't (yeah, I'm an optimist). I called their tech support to make sure there wasn't a firmware update I might need to make. All of my hardware should be supported (ICH6R chipset, right ram, right pci slot, etc) they said. They have not tested it at all in Linux he said (This didn't matter since I could show issues in Win32XP). He was not able to immediately RMA a new card however . . .all they have on hand in support is apparently one of hte prototype cards . ..so I'm having to wait until he gets one of the new ones, one of my chipset boards, and the suggested ram before he can make the call that a replacement would fix the issue.

I knew ahead of time I'd be dealing with early adopter pain, but there is use even though "SATA is so slow!". Yeah. Well, being able to push all 150mbytes/sec per SATA channel is good enough for me. That'd saturate a gigabit line and is good enough for me and I can put a 4gig ram disk on boards that wont support 4gig of ram total...

Don't consider this a review. I'm not speaking for or against the thing. This is purely my experience so far with *one* card...