Really Fast Drive! or ?

Adcadet

Adcadet

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why does it use SATA for data transfer? Is this to get directly into the south bridge (or whatever they're now called) of newer chipsets?
 
Pradeep

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Adcadet said:
why does it use SATA for data transfer? Is this to get directly into the south bridge (or whatever they're now called) of newer chipsets?
Click to expand...

SATA so you could boot off it, without any special drivers. And as sechs mentioned, faster than 32bit PCI. I would imagine a SATA II version would be handy.
 
L

LOST6200

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sechs said:
It's a 5v PCI conventional card. Not exactly the bandwidth king.
Click to expand...
The PCI slot is used only to supply power and as a physical location. The interface is SATA.
 
Santilli

Santilli

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Wonder if the card shows up as C drive? I think it's a really cool idea, but, a lot of programs require a c drive installation to work, games in particular. Palm Pilot for another.

Should be near the perfect place for a scratch disk for PS, and a great place for the pagefile for XP.


s
 
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LOST6200

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It jsut sounds too ghood to be true, so I am naturlich suspicious.
 
F

Fushigi

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Doesn't sound too good to me at all. I would be continually nervous about my C: drive losing data after a mere 12 hours of no power to the system. If it had a larger internal battery or, since it's using a PCI slot, a link to an external power pack that could provide a week or more of standby power I'd be interested.

Sure, you could (probably) Ghost-restore the drive if it lost the data, but then you'd lose all of that 'saved' time.
 
Bozo

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The article that I read said there is power all the time to the PCI slots, even with the PC shut off. (This is how you start a PC over a network). The battery is for anytime the PC is unplugged from a power source.
And, if the PC was on a UPS, you could get a week or more of stand by power.

I wonder if you can put more than one in the same PC?

Bozo :mrgrn:
 
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Fushigi

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Yes, I saw that, but I still don't consider it sufficient. What would be sufficient would be the internal battery with an NVRAM backup where, if a power loss occurs, the RAM contents are written to NVRAM. My PDA/phone does something similar; RAM contents are continually backed to NVRAM to ensure nothing is lost if the battery dies or is suddenly removed.

The NVRAM could be relatively slow; it wouldn't matter. This would add to the cost, obviously, but it shouldn't be a dealbreaker. Maybe $250 or so to add the guts of 4 1GB CFII/SD cards to the circuit board + some firmware for the backup/restore.
 
Computer Generated Baby

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Several years ago, Microsoft proposed a similar scheme to systems builders: Provide a version of embedded Windows in the mobo.

The result for the user would be super quick booting from a cold power-up start.

Of course, the price of the mobo would be about US$250 ~ $350 higher, ($100 or so for Windows O/S and NV memory + associated hardware). Microsoft would benefit greatly from embedding the O/S because they would sidestep the efforts of software bootleggers.

In the end, virtually all the systems builders rejected this plan mainly because of price and the fact that it could also turn out to be a major PITA to deal with operating system updates.


 
C

cquinn

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Fushigi said:
This would add to the cost, obviously, but it shouldn't be a dealbreaker. Maybe $250 or so to add the guts of 4 1GB CFII/SD cards to the circuit board + some firmware for the backup/restore.
Click to expand...

That would be a dealbreaker, this is not a end all solution, its only
one component in an overall setup. It is designed to be as simple
as possible to allow for further backup/complexity to come from the
rest of the system.

Your suggestion only works as far as the assumption that you
could only put 4 1G sticks of RAM onto the board. If it is possible
to put more on there, then your backup is stuck, unless you
also want to try to compress the image from the main drive.

It would be easier to have a small hard drive in the system on standby, that is either mirroring the RAM disk in real time, or is set to dump an
image from the RAM disk as soon as the UPS kicks in.

Another option would be to connect a secondary battery unit to
the device, to provide a longer time to live for the existing data.
 
LunarMist

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Bozo said:
And, if the PC was on a UPS, you could get a week or more of stand by power.
Click to expand...
The base power consumption of a UPS will not allow for a week of operation even without load.

I wonder if you can put more than one in the same PC?

Bozo :mrgrn:
Click to expand...

Interesting. I suppose all the RAID0-mongers will be trying just that.
 
ddrueding

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I'm very interested in this product, and in a CF-based IDE drive to store the backup image. My system already has 4GB of RAM, so a 4GB SSD and a 4GB CF sounds quite do-able. RAID-1 would only be viable if I could dedicate a significant amount of the system memory to caching writes to the CF card; and even if I could figure out how to do that, then a power failure would still screw me.

I'd prefer a method for backing up the SSD to CF manually from within the GUI/OS. What software would best be suited for this task?
 
Santilli

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Let me know how it works out.

David, why 4 gigs of ram in your machine?

Thanks

Greg
 
L

LOST6200

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Both the current Ghost (aka Drive Image) and Acronis should work, but I have not tried them specifically with CF cards. Restoration still requires booting from a CD or similar. You might prefer to image directly to a DVD writer.
 
ddrueding

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LOST6200 said:
Both the current Ghost (aka Drive Image) and Acronis should work, but I have not tried them specifically with CF cards. Restoration still requires booting from a CD or similar. You might prefer to image directly to a DVD writer.
Click to expand...

Good point on imaging directly to the writer. Considering the imare will NEVER be larger than 4GB, it makes a lot of sense. Screw the CF card and reader.
 
LunarMist

LunarMist

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CF=Compact Flash. 4GB cards have been around for years and 8GB are readily available. There are some larger, very expensive cards as well.
 
L

LOST6200

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So wTF every happened with this device in the martkeplatz? Or its it vaporware?
 
CougTek

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I did a quick google search on it and I found this in an article posted on october 10th :

EDITOR UPDATE: Our sample of the Gigabyte i-RAM is still in development and in the next couple months before it is released, Gigabyte intend on making further refinements to the product.
Click to expand...
So it is still vaporware.
 
CougTek

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Tech-Report made up a review of the i-RAM drive. IMO, it has many hard-to-forgive short-comings : SATA 150MBps only and doesn't support larger than 1GB sticks. It still kicks the ass of everything else that can be plugged to a SATA controller and its IOmeter's results are god-like, but I have a feeling that it could have been even better if only it would have support SATA 300MBps.

They say it's finally available. Their price engine only list it at TigerDirect for 150$ without the memory modules.
 
CougTek

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Ok, now I'm pissed. The html tag worked when I previewed my post but now they no longer do. Ostie d'Calice de Tabarnack.
 
CougTek

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The expected announcement of i-RAM 2 is targeted for February next year.
Click to expand...
February has come and gone. For those who want something fast now and don't want to wait for half an eternity, there's the first-gen i-RAM
 
ddrueding

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I was really excited about this until I installed Vista for the first time...9.5GB! Even the I-Ram 2 @ 16GB means we're cutting it a bit close for a single-drive workstation.
 
Pradeep

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15MB/s for a normal notebook drive? That seems low.

Nevermind, I see it's a 1.8" form factor.
 
CougTek

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I would be very interested in a 2.5", 60GB+ Samsung drive otherwise similar to the one Aussie Owl linked. That would be great inside an external USB 2.0 enclosure to backup the important data from the customers' hard drive when we wipe/re-install their system. Our current system is more clumsy.
 
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