Let's talk faster then HDDs And SSDs

[Ghaz]

Okay so recently I've been looking around for something fast. Firstly, I came across using RAM as storage. The best I could find that was not horribly expensive was Gigabyte's I-ram. The first edition uses a pci slot, and supports 4x1GB of DDR 400 RAM. I will link some benchmarks, and this is obviously going to be very fast. I've seen videos of it going from windows starting to boot to desktop in 4 seconds. However, it is bottlenecked by the use of 150mbs sata, although it has access speeds of microseconds. There were plans for a second one, supporting better (perhaps more) RAM, and 300mbs sata... However, I don't think this will ever be released. Still, it sounds excellent for a game/windows. (A couple of notes though, obv. ram is volatile, and as soon as the given battery runs out, your data is lost. It is charged by your system, however. Also, I have heard of a bay mounted one as opposed to a pci version).

Through browsing of expensive stuff (I heard of rumours of some storage medium costing £7000 to £25000, although I didn't see much, and I may be lying ;p). I then came across something called the iodrive. This is the dream storage medium.

To put shortly:

800mbs Bandwidth

Access speed of microseconds

Solid State

Available from 80GB to 640GB, 1TB planned.

I don't think this has been released yet. The major downside is that it is predicted to cost £15 a gigabyte, and as the smallest one will be 80GB, this sure is not going to be cheap.

I'm seriously thinking of getting some I-ram though; costing about £65 plus 4x1GB sticks, its not horribly expensive. Some people will be put off by the small space, but put a game or your OS on it, your going to be having fun.

[Mr. Smith]

I remember the iodrive, I did a news article back in 2007 here

There are some nice pictures and a video. I'd love one...

Edit: I-ram is sucky; 4gb isn't enough for vista or windows 7, needs a seperate power supply or all the data goes, it's only 4gb...

[Ghaz]

Originally Posted by name='Mr. Smith'

I remember the iodrive, I did a news article back in 2007 here

There are some nice pictures and a video. I'd love one...

Edit: I-ram is sucky; 4gb isn't enough for vista or windows 7, needs a seperate power supply or all the data goes, it's only 4gb...

I'm sure you could strip xp down a bit using nlite and get it on there. I saw someone boot xp in 4 seonds, but I read a review, saying:

"Second, we encountered numerous minor errors and Registry corruptions, which wasn't particularly reassuring.

The final problems are the most damning, though. We didn't experience much evidence of the super-fast transfer speeds. Windows loaded three seconds quicker from the i-RAM than from the Raptor. Reformatting the i-RAM and installing Far Cry on it saw level load times of 39.1 seconds instead of 40.4 on the Raptor. We didn't feel as though Windows was working much faster, if at all."

-PC Pro

I really want an iodrive, but there is now way I could afford £1200 ><

How much performance boost does Raid 0 give? Before I came across this stuff, I was tempted by raid. Not as expensive either

[monkey7]

Though I know you want to go faster than SDDs, but you should take a look at the OCZ OCZSSD2-1C32G and 64G ssd's. They are incredibly cheap compared to other solid state disks and I have heard rumours (not confirmed!) about speeds of 120/150 and 0.35 seconds seek. For a retail price of €150 for the 32GB version, RAID 0 may be interesting to reach 200/250 to 240/300 speeds.

[Pjalchemist]

The OCZ's SSD are amazing. 2 or more you need a PCI-E raid card.

The I-ram now comes in a drive bay flavour but it still the same as it was sadly. However no one else tried it and have missed out what could be amazing.

The Fuzion IO is amazin but £20K for smallest size, jog on

However in an Intel lab in the UK there SSD, fastest thing ever made and out todate and out soon

[Bungral]

Why do you need a PCI-E raid card for 2 plus SSDs?

[Toxcity]

Originally Posted by name='Bungral'

Why do you need a PCI-E raid card for 2 plus SSDs?

Higher Bandwidth?

[Silentsnake]

this may sound noobish but can you tell that your pc has sped up or slowed down with a faster or slower HDD?

lets say we have 2 identical systems only difference is that one has a 7200 rpm and the other is 10k Rpm will you notice a greater performance to justify that extra money you spent :S?

[Bungral]

Yes, you'll notice the difference alright, but whether it justifies the cost is another thing.

[Ham]

I never noticed a difference going from 7200 to 10k rpm tbh.