Eclecticos
01-27-2008, 09:10 AM
http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/3076/gigawd7.gif
Although performance has been greatly enhanced over the last few years through the use of faster spindle speeds, larger caches, and newer interfaces, hard drives still tend to be a bottleneck in a typical PC. Mechanical devices, by their very nature, require time to seek the data requested, read it, and then transfer that information back to system memory. Also, while SATA technology has increased transfer rates from the paltry 33MB/s of the original ATA spec to a healthy 300MB/s on the latest SATA-II controllers, there's still room for improvement, although the drives themselves will still struggle to saturate the bandwidth on this interface.
http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/8784/iramwithmemoryod5.jpg
One idea, although hardly new, is to create a solid-state drive with no moving parts whatsoever. Past attempts, such as Cenatek's RocketDrive, have been very costly and as a result have not found much acceptance in the retail market. The optimal result is to achieve the right price vs. capacity ratio; a drive large enough to install files or applications to that won't cost much more than the rest of the system's individual components. What we've received from Gigabyte may just fulfill those requirements. The i-RAM, or GC-RAMDISK as it is officially known, is a single PCI card that has support for up to 4GB of memory, using nothing more than standard DDR DIMMS, regardless of their respective speeds. Recognized as an ordinary drive by the system, it's a simple, straightforward approach at increased drive performance.
Got DDR Laying around?
Although performance has been greatly enhanced over the last few years through the use of faster spindle speeds, larger caches, and newer interfaces, hard drives still tend to be a bottleneck in a typical PC. Mechanical devices, by their very nature, require time to seek the data requested, read it, and then transfer that information back to system memory. Also, while SATA technology has increased transfer rates from the paltry 33MB/s of the original ATA spec to a healthy 300MB/s on the latest SATA-II controllers, there's still room for improvement, although the drives themselves will still struggle to saturate the bandwidth on this interface.
http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/8784/iramwithmemoryod5.jpg
One idea, although hardly new, is to create a solid-state drive with no moving parts whatsoever. Past attempts, such as Cenatek's RocketDrive, have been very costly and as a result have not found much acceptance in the retail market. The optimal result is to achieve the right price vs. capacity ratio; a drive large enough to install files or applications to that won't cost much more than the rest of the system's individual components. What we've received from Gigabyte may just fulfill those requirements. The i-RAM, or GC-RAMDISK as it is officially known, is a single PCI card that has support for up to 4GB of memory, using nothing more than standard DDR DIMMS, regardless of their respective speeds. Recognized as an ordinary drive by the system, it's a simple, straightforward approach at increased drive performance.
Got DDR Laying around?