eesz34 wrote on 2023-03-30, 11:41:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-30, 10:43:

Bought this NIB Gigabyte Iram today, seems like a pretty cool way to use spare DDR to act as a SSD like device. Seller sates the battery seems fine but I will likely buy a new one for it as a spare, not sure if these can be recharged or not. (Yes they can be, says right on the battery doh)

That's intriguing. I didn't know anything like this was produced for such a modern system. (If it's not ISA or *maybe* PCI it's "modern" ha ha)

its PCI, and limited to sata 1 speeds.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-30, 10:43:

Bought this NIB Gigabyte Iram today, seems like a pretty cool way to use spare DDR to act as a SSD like device.

I wouldnt even open the box and leave it as is. With its limitations (4GB, 150MB/s) completely useless in the age of disposable $15 256GB SSDs, but cool item to go on a shelf. Raiding 4 of those http://kiti.main.jp/Report/Waller/Waller1.htm http://kiti.main.jp/Report/Waller/Waller2.htm

Socket3 wrote on 2023-03-30, 11:16:

I love the Volari card's look - a real monster. I remember seeing them back in the day when I was working as a repair technician for a large IT hardware importer. They were larger and heavier then any other consumer GPU in production. We also got quite a few of them for RMA. There was nothing wrong with the cards, the issue actually was the client's PC. I remember a case where a client purchased a Volari Duo and installed it in a 933MHz pentium 3 with a 250w no-name power supply. The whole system would freeze as soon as it booted into windows.

At first he sent in the card alone - I tested the card it was perfectly fine and sent it back. Then he came into one of our stores and started complaining, so I had to drive to said store and have a look at his setup. He did not understand that the power supply was insufficient. I had to run his machine off a 550w Antec Truepower test PSU they had in the shop - and then he complained about how it got the same score as the Geforce 2 Pro he had before updating. I spent the better part of the day explaining CPU bottlenecks and power requirements. At the end of the day we setup a test rig consisting of an athlon XP 2200+ and his volari card, with predictable results -the test rig scored twice in 3dmark. He then bough a 2.5Ghz pentium 4 CPU and motherboard. What annoyed me is that the (substantial) sales commission went to one of the store workers despite me spending half the day with the client.

Wow that really sucks you had to travel do all the work and didn't get the commission for all the trouble you had to go through.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-30, 11:51:

eesz34 wrote on 2023-03-30, 11:41:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-30, 10:43:

Bought this NIB Gigabyte Iram today, seems like a pretty cool way to use spare DDR to act as a SSD like device. Seller sates the battery seems fine but I will likely buy a new one for it as a spare, not sure if these can be recharged or not. (Yes they can be, says right on the battery doh)

That's intriguing. I didn't know anything like this was produced for such a modern system. (If it's not ISA or *maybe* PCI it's "modern" ha ha)

its PCI, and limited to sata 1 speeds.

Ahh ok, I didn't pay enough attention then. Released in 2005 so less than 20 years old.

PCI is just to hold the card and provide power

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2023-03-30, 12:18:

Socket3 wrote on 2023-03-30, 11:16:

I love the Volari card's look - a real monster. I remember seeing them back in the day when I was working as a repair technician for a large IT hardware importer. They were larger and heavier then any other consumer GPU in production. We also got quite a few of them for RMA. There was nothing wrong with the cards, the issue actually was the client's PC. I remember a case where a client purchased a Volari Duo and installed it in a 933MHz pentium 3 with a 250w no-name power supply. The whole system would freeze as soon as it booted into windows.

At first he sent in the card alone - I tested the card it was perfectly fine and sent it back. Then he came into one of our stores and started complaining, so I had to drive to said store and have a look at his setup. He did not understand that the power supply was insufficient. I had to run his machine off a 550w Antec Truepower test PSU they had in the shop - and then he complained about how it got the same score as the Geforce 2 Pro he had before updating. I spent the better part of the day explaining CPU bottlenecks and power requirements. At the end of the day we setup a test rig consisting of an athlon XP 2200+ and his volari card, with predictable results -the test rig scored twice in 3dmark. He then bough a 2.5Ghz pentium 4 CPU and motherboard. What annoyed me is that the (substantial) sales commission went to one of the store workers despite me spending half the day with the client.

Wow that really sucks you had to travel do all the work and didn't get the commission for all the trouble you had to go through.

That's the way it goes in corporate environments sometimes. I worked in service / RMA, I was not entitled to a commission...

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-30, 11:51:

eesz34 wrote on 2023-03-30, 11:41:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-03-30, 10:43:

Bought this NIB Gigabyte Iram today, seems like a pretty cool way to use spare DDR to act as a SSD like device. Seller sates the battery seems fine but I will likely buy a new one for it as a spare, not sure if these can be recharged or not. (Yes they can be, says right on the battery doh)

That's intriguing. I didn't know anything like this was produced for such a modern system. (If it's not ISA or *maybe* PCI it's "modern" ha ha)

its PCI, and limited to sata 1 speeds.

That's pretty neat... Now registered DDR shouldn't have an overall performance penalty in that, so 2GB and 4GB server modules might work... apart from it being really hard to find them without also having ECC which tends to be the compatibility problem. Well that is if Gigabyte connected the lines for more than 1GB/module. ... then you could have 16GB and XP or so on it, instant on PC with an atom board in your car, so you can play bangers like canyon.mid on the road.

I've wanted to get one of those i-RAM drives but was never willing to pay the price they go for.

They also came in a 5.25" bay format.

There is a company that is getting ready to release a PCIe device that takes DDR4 modules. Initial testing shows a 15GB/s throughput.

The nice thing about these types of devices is that the seek times will be significantly faster than SSDs.

I picked up an i-RAM a few years back but I have yet to test it since it needs a battery to survive a system shut down. I believe it also has a couple of bad or damaged caps on it.

It's definitely a neat idea, but yeah... the performance is probably indistinguishable from even a slow SSD.

As for faster seek times... there may be specific work loads that benefit from that, but as it is there is almost zero tangible benefit from NVMe over SATA in most cases. Generally, once you get past spinning media and move to solid state of any kind, only enthusiasts with specific workloads will notice much of a difference.

... that said, I draw the line at DRAMless QLC SATA drives personally. The performance drop off when doing very large file transfers is just not worth the pennies saved.

cyclone3d wrote on 2023-03-30, 19:59:

There is a company that is getting ready to release a PCIe device that takes DDR4 modules. Initial testing shows a 15GB/s throughput.

afaik its a russian site hiding the fact they are russians ("made in san jose", youtube location Singapore). They have plenty "out of stock" listings in the store with prices (cheaper than FPGA would cost) despite the fact they never sold anything.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-03-30, 20:29:

... that said, I draw the line at DRAMless QLC SATA drives personally. The performance drop off when doing very large file transfers is just not worth the pennies saved.

This is my opinion as well.

I've thought about these iRAM drives a couple of times, but fast CF cards already exist and the added stress of having a battery coupled with taking up a precious PCI slot for only 4GB is a very hard sell now. It's not even valuable to me as a swap drive.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-03-30, 22:34:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-03-30, 20:29:

... that said, I draw the line at DRAMless QLC SATA drives personally. The performance drop off when doing very large file transfers is just not worth the pennies saved.

This is my opinion as well.

I've thought about these iRAM drives a couple of times, but fast CF cards already exist and the added stress of having a battery coupled with taking up a precious PCI slot for only 4GB is a very hard sell now. It's not even valuable to me as a swap drive.

Yeah it has limitations which make it impractical for use in a machine that's only used infrequently, I grabbed it because its a rather cool bit of tech that will look great along side my other oddities like the hybrid AGP/PCIe boards and the dual socket 754/939 board.

I am curious if itll take the server DDR modules suggested above so I may give it a quick test run and see what it does as I do have a couple odd DDR server modules in the spares box.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-03-30, 20:29:

I picked up an i-RAM a few years back but I have yet to test it since it needs a battery to survive a system shut down. I believ […]
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I picked up an i-RAM a few years back but I have yet to test it since it needs a battery to survive a system shut down. I believe it also has a couple of bad or damaged caps on it.

It's definitely a neat idea, but yeah... the performance is probably indistinguishable from even a slow SSD.

As for faster seek times... there may be specific work loads that benefit from that, but as it is there is almost zero tangible benefit from NVMe over SATA in most cases. Generally, once you get past spinning media and move to solid state of any kind, only enthusiasts with specific workloads will notice much of a difference.

... that said, I draw the line at DRAMless QLC SATA drives personally. The performance drop off when doing very large file transfers is just not worth the pennies saved.

Cheap Large Dramless QLC drives do have a purpose, they are great for handling data you don't write to often but can benefit from being read back quickly ..like Bluray dvd rips and such. I have two 8tb Samsung SSDs being used for that in media PCs and they function fine for that task. (faster and quieter than spinning rust so were worth the initial cost, should also produce less heat and last longer too)

I wouldnt use them for anything requiring fast writing or constant access.

I feel as though there is such a small difference in price between with or without DRAM, that I may as well buy it with DRAM so avoid adding marginal drives to my collection.

Does anyone have a good use for an iRAM over an SSD?

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-03-31, 03:26:

I feel as though there is such a small difference in price between with or without DRAM, that I may as well buy it with DRAM so avoid adding marginal drives to my collection.

Does anyone have a good use for an iRAM over an SSD?

The 8Tb Dram TLC/MLC SSDs are stupidly expensive, the 4TB versions are no different, so if all you need is fast read mass storage for infrequently written data then there is little point is buying the expensive Dram SSDs, if read/write speed isn't an issue then nothing beats Spinning Rust for both size and cost and in a Raid 5 setup Spinning Rust cant be beat for long term reliable Mass storage.

If you are looking at 2TB or less then yea I agree no point in grabbing the cheap QLC drives, you will always be better off with the slightly more expensive Dram SSDs.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-03-31, 03:26:

I feel as though there is such a small difference in price between with or without DRAM, that I may as well buy it with DRAM so avoid adding marginal drives to my collection.

Does anyone have a good use for an iRAM over an SSD?

None other than its using spare ram you may already have laying around, its not meant to replace a Sata SSD but work along side it, its access times should be considerably faster than most SSDs of that time too. If it can use the 2gb server DDR sticks then it it could be a nice 8Gb Ram Disk.
Im thinking that under Linux it could potentially be very useful.

I guess if you had a well tuned linux install on a Pentium D or something board that only took 2GB of RAM you might like fast swap you can hammer away at without a write limit. Though even so you could probably give it a partition of 32GB on a cheap 256MB SSD, leave the rest unallocated, and with the combo of less rewrites from bigger swapfile and plenty of spare sectors to reallocate, it would last a decade probably.

I thought the max size of iRAM was 4GB. Can anyone confirm?

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-03-31, 05:11:

I thought the max size of iRAM was 4GB. Can anyone confirm?

It is if it only supports normal DDR, not sure yet if it can work with the 2gb ECC DDR sticks, I have a few here I can test with, if it works Ill likely grab 4 2gb sticks off the bay.

One of the use cases I see for this drive over an SSD is swap or for a database. But I can't imagine a system using it that would be used actively enough for the swap performance to matter. The same goes for a database, which would also be extremely risky if the battery were to fail.

Another use case would be the operating system, but most important system files get cached into memory already, and reading them is already fast.

The last use case I can think of, which is somewhat reasonable, is to copy games onto it simply for the fastest load times. This is somewhat more realistic, but I think it would be difficult to measure compared to a DRAM cached SSD. Even though there is raw performance available, a lot of that will be lost due to filesystem and API overhead. Actual raw memory speeds won't necessarily translate into comparable filesystem performance.

I think a good real world benchmark for game level load time would be Doom 3. Those levels can take a long time to load, even on a fast machine.