Verdict: Super-fast storage with no moving parts - is the hard disk dead?
The death knell of the spinning platter has allegedly been sounding for years - only the companies manufacturing them don't seem to have been listening. For most of the last decade, solid-state memory has regularly been suggested as a replacement for mechanical data storage systems, particularly for its performance benefits.
However, using RAM instead of a hard drive has always had inherent drawbacks. On a per gigabyte basis, RAM is a lot more expensive than magnetic disks, and if you cut the power, your data will disappear into electron heaven.
Still, RAM disks have incredible benefits for certain applications. Giant RAM disks are sometimes used for database storage, where the lightning-fast access times can be a real boon. In fact, some shadowy departments of US security services allegedly use them precisely because you can't steal the data along with the disks themselves - as soon as you unplug the power, the contents of a RAM disk storage system are forgotten forever.
For the hardware enthusiast, though, performance benefits are the main draw. This is the philosophy behind Gigabyte's i-RAM. It isn't the first product we've seen that attempts to bring RAM disk technology to the masses - we previewed the HyperOS HyperDrive a few months ago. However, the i-RAM is the first device we've seen that's available to buy as a finished product. Gigabyte claims that it's the 'fastest storage device you have ever imagined'.
Installing the i-RAM isn't too taxing. Although it comes as a PCI card, this is merely so that the i-RAM can draw power directly from the motherboard. The device actually connects to your PC via S-ATA. This means that it presents itself to the system as a regular hard disk, so no third-party drivers are required. You simply install your RAM DIMMs, plug in everything, and on booting up, you have another hard disk ready for formatting.
However, you have to be careful about which RAM you use. The i-RAM sports four DIMM sockets, each one accommodating up to 1GB of PC3200 DDR. However, the compatibility list on Gigabyte's website is pretty short, and the list in the supplied manual is even shorter. We've heard of problems getting memory that isn't listed to work, so we plugged two unsupported 512MB modules of Crucial PC3200 into the i-RAM. Although this memory isn't included on the compatibility list, we found that it worked fine.
In the long run, though, you're better off sticking with memory that you know will work. We loaded the i-RAM with four 1GB modules of Kingston PC3200 DDR, making sure that the module part numbers were exactly the same as those on Gigabyte's compatibility list. We then booted up our test rig and found that everything worked perfectly, and we had a super-fast 4GB RAM disk ready for action.
The i-RAM is a simple device, but it has a couple of features worth mentioning. There's a backup battery and a message LED with four states to help you work out whether the RAM disk is functioning correctly. Although Gigabyte recommends that you leave your PC plugged in to retain the contents of the RAM disk, the backup battery will keep the memory powered for up to ten hours. Keeping regular backups will be essential: although the battery worked during testing, data loss isn't something you'd want to risk.
PERFORMANCE
You'd have to be borderline insane to install your main OS on a RAM disk. The chances of finding the system wiped one morning are far too great, but as we're nutty people here at Custom PC, this is precisely what we did.
Having your OS on the i-RAM lets you see its most impressive feat. Windows XP took around ten seconds to load after the BIOS checks had been completed - less than half the time it took to boot our test system with a 250GB Samsung SpinPoint P120S installed. Sadly, the continual bloating of Windows means that 4GB doesn't really afford you much room these days. We also had issues with reliability when the i-RAM was the system's sole drive; Windows corrupted if we installed the nForce4 SLI driver's IDE SW driver, and it didn't like the drivers for our Nvidia graphics card either.
When we installed Windows and the Custom PC Media Benchmarks 2005 on the i-RAM, the lack of remaining space meant that we had to disable virtual memory in order to successfully benchmark our test system. We used the same PC to test the i-RAM as we used in the last Hard Disk labs, so the results are directly comparable. The test rig features an nForce4 SLI motherboard, 2GB of RAM and an Athlon 64 FX-55 CPU multiplier overclocked to 2.8GHz. The raw throughput available from the i-RAM was way ahead of any hard disk we've ever seen. Using Simpli Software's HD Tach 3 RW, we recorded a random access time of 0ms, an average read of 124.1MB/sec and an average write of 111MB/sec. Even Western Digital's new Raptor X doesn't come close, offering an average read of 78MB/sec and an average write of 66.7MB/sec. However, as fast as it is, we still couldn't help but feel that the i-RAM was held back by its 150MB/sec S-ATA interface.
With the i-RAM installed as its only disk, our test PC blitzed through our Paint Shop Pro image editing test in 365 seconds, a score of 1.63 - faster than any hard disk we've seen, but only just. The top score in our Labs test was 1.61, from the Western Digital Caviar RE2, and the Raptor X scored 1.62.
Another feature that may appeal to the hardware enthusiast is the option to load a favourite game or two onto the RAM drive, although again space is limited. We added a hard disk to our test PC to cope with Windows, leaving the i-RAM free for games. However, our standard level-loading test game, Far Cry, claimed most of the space. Again, the i-RAM was faster than any hard disk we've seen, loading the level in 44 seconds, compared to the Raptor X's 50.5 . The i-RAM is also considerably slower than the HyperOS HyperDrive - although this isn't currently available to buy, and the unit we tested was a pre-production sample.
CONCLUSION
Gigabyte's i-RAM is fast, but it's not
as fast as you might expect - partly because it's only a S-ATA device, not S-ATA II, and also, perhaps, because PCs and software are designed with hard disks in mind. We just couldn't shake the feeling that we weren't seeing the best of the i-RAM, and its benchmark results reflect that.
The fully stocked setup we tested will set you back a considerable amount of cash, too. The memory we installed costs £99.33 per stick (www.orcalogic-kingston.co.uk), bringing the total for this 4GB RAM disk to £674.94, or £168.74 per GB. This is nearly 100 times more expensive than even the crazily expensive Raptor X.
There's also the severe limitation of the i-RAM's 4GB capacity. Gigabyte has achieved the most effective RAM disk implementation we've seen, but it's only likely to be of interest to the insanely rich, or maybe the richly insane. The only sensible reason for buying it that we can think of is for accessing a huge 4GB database.
