RAM Based Disk Drive?

On 10/31/06, Adam <adam@spatialsystems.org> wrote:

I recently saw a Hard Disk Drive that is really 4GB of RAM with and SATA
1.5Gb/s serial interface. It's basically a hard disk drive that uses RAM.
It also has a battery backup, so if you loose power, you don't loose your
data.

Has anyone tried using this, and if so was there a noticeable performance
increase?

you are talking about the gigabyte i-ram. in the database world, you
can achieve same thing (actually better) by sticking those ram sticks
directly on the motherboard assuming you are in a 64 bit environment
and the motherboard is decent.

the main advantage of the iram that i see is faster boot times (big
woop). call me when they have a version that does 256gb :-)

merlin

On Tuesday 31 October 2006 11:48, "Merlin Moncure" <mmoncure@gmail.com>
wrote:

you are talking about the gigabyte i-ram. in the database world, you
can achieve same thing (actually better) by sticking those ram sticks
directly on the motherboard assuming you are in a 64 bit environment
and the motherboard is decent.

the main advantage of the iram that i see is faster boot times (big
woop). call me when they have a version that does 256gb :-)

http://www.superssd.com/products_sub.htm

And, of course, the real advantage to a solid-state drive is random access
speed, which vastly improves both random writes and random reads.

Not that I can afford one, of course ...

--
Ginsberg's Theorem:
1) You can't win.
2) You can't break even.
3) You can't quit the game.

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On 10/31/06 13:48, Merlin Moncure wrote:

On 10/31/06, Adam <adam@spatialsystems.org> wrote:

I recently saw a Hard Disk Drive that is really 4GB of RAM with and SATA
1.5Gb/s serial interface. It's basically a hard disk drive that uses
RAM.
It also has a battery backup, so if you loose power, you don't loose your
data.

Has anyone tried using this, and if so was there a noticeable performance
increase?

you are talking about the gigabyte i-ram. in the database world, you
can achieve same thing (actually better) by sticking those ram sticks
directly on the motherboard assuming you are in a 64 bit environment
and the motherboard is decent.

the main advantage of the iram that i see is faster boot times (big
woop). call me when they have a version that does 256gb :-)

OLTP rates are *much* higher with SSDs. (Even with lots of system
RAM, you *still* have to write the data back to the disk, and that
takes time.) But that's only if you've got a small db that needs
*really* high tps rates.

I'd rather spend my money on enough system RAM to keep the active
portion of my DB in the OS cache.

- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA

Is "common sense" really valid?
For example, it is "common sense" to white-power racists that
whites are superior to blacks, and that those with brown skins
are mud people.
However, that "common sense" is obviously wrong.
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On 10/31/06, Alan Hodgson <ahodgson@simkin.ca> wrote:

On Tuesday 31 October 2006 11:48, "Merlin Moncure" <mmoncure@gmail.com>
wrote:

you are talking about the gigabyte i-ram. in the database world, you
can achieve same thing (actually better) by sticking those ram sticks
directly on the motherboard assuming you are in a 64 bit environment
and the motherboard is decent.

the main advantage of the iram that i see is faster boot times (big
woop). call me when they have a version that does 256gb :-)

http://www.superssd.com/products_sub.htm

And, of course, the real advantage to a solid-state drive is random access
speed, which vastly improves both random writes and random reads.

well, some motherboards out there, for example the tyan vx50
(http://www.tyan.com/products/html/vx50b4881.html) can stock up to
128gb ram. For a database server, this will probably outperform the
'ramsan' on many workloads. the ramsan is easier to stack though.

merlin