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To understand why a bizarre device like this one here exists, we need to travel

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back to the time of its release.

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The year was 2006. High performance consumer SSDs were still 2 years away,

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an eternity in computer hardware terms. And even the fastest consumer hard drive

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on the market, the Western Digital Raptor X, barely stood out from the

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pack. So, there was a very real appetite for faster boot devices. Meanwhile,

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Intel's Core2 Duo Conro platform was one

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of the most compelling upgrades for gamers in years, but it required an

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upgrade to shiny new DDR2 memory,

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resulting in an abundance of Castaway DDR1 memory sticks. So, there to

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capitalize on these two conditions was

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Gigabyte. The idea here was really simple. Here we go. Take some of the

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leftover DDR1 memory that you already have lying around and instead of

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spending thousands of dollars on an SSD,

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take it, chuck it on this thing, and use that as your system boot drive.

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I never had one of these when they were new. Back then, I was busy spending all

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my money on textbooks I'd never read for a degree that I'd never finish. That

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worked out great. So, when I saw this on eBay for like 30 bucks, I figured, what

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the hey, let's take a look at it. Let's start with the PCI connector. Now, on

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the surface, you might think that this looks very similar to a modern PCI

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Express SSD, but you'd be wrong for a

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number of reasons. Starting with the connector at the bottom. This is a PCI

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connector and this interface capped out at just 133 megabytes per second. That

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is even less than SATA 1 at 150

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megabytes a second. But that wasn't even its main problem. PCI is what's called a

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shared bus, which means that every device on it has to fight over that 133

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megabytes a second. And thing is, many

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older motherboard designs not only had their PCI slots hooked up to it, they

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even had onboard devices like their built-in sound card and network

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interface running off of it already. So,

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this slot was only suitable to use for

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power. It's also got a SATA port, so

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that's how it actually communicates with the rest of your system. Unlike PCI,

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SATA ports are not forced to share the same bus. So that means full performance

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to this port all the time. Well, at

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least as long as you don't run into a bottleneck elsewhere in your system,

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like on the link between the south bridge and the north bridge. I remember

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people used to hit those all the time when they were running multiple drives

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in RAID zero. Now, let's talk about this

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chip right here. This XYLink's FPGA

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probably represents a big chunk of the cost of the IRAM. FPGAAS offer

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incredible flexibility, allowing one to basically manufacture a processor in

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software, then program that processor

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into a blank one. Now, the cost is that

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you lose some efficiency and your per unit costs go way up. If this was a high

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volume product, they'd create custom silicon for it. But Gigabyte, even at

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the time, admitted that their first production run was a measly 1,000 units

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for the entire world. So clearly custom

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silicon wasn't going to be a problem. Let's talk about why they needed this

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processor, though. Fundamentally, the principle of storing data is the same

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between RAM and hard drives. You got your ones and you got your zeros. But

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the way the binary data is organized on

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the device is completely different. A

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hard drive uses a physical spinning platter covered in circular tracks that

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are divided up into sectors. So when your operating system asks for a

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particular bit, it tells your hard drive where to move the read head to grab the

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information it needs as it goes whipping by at 7200 revs per minute. By contrast,

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RAM stores bits, so zeros and ones, in

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cells that are laid out in a giant grid

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and that can be instantly accessed as long as you know the intersecting row

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and column, which is known as an address. Well, that's exactly the

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performance advantage that we're after here. But it also means that you can't

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just treat this thing exactly the way that you would a hard drive. So, our

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FPGA is programmed to act as a

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translation layer between our SATA interface here and the memory controller

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that's built into it. Now, let's look at the memory slots. These are operating at

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DDR1200 MHz. And while modern memory

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modules and their controllers would operate at much higher frequencies, even

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with the inefficiency of using SATA instead of NVMe like we would for any

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solid state drive today, that is a theoretical limit of 1.6 GB per second

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between our FPGA and our RAM here. That's as fast as a decent modern SSD

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and way faster than a hard drive. Well,

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SATA bottleneck notwithstanding. So, let's get the rest of these RAM sticks

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on here. Let's fire this thing up. All right. So, as you guys probably saw, I

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already had Windows fired up on this thing before we started. So, okay, just

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going to go ahead put all my RAM back into place. Let's throw this on the one

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accessible PCI slot we have on this board

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and fire it up. Well, that's curious. It's empty. No

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bootable device. So, our Gigabyte IRAM is showing up as

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our first boot device,

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but we failed to boot. My device that was full not half an hour

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ago is now empty. And there in lies the

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Achilles heel of the Gigabyte RAM. DRAM

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is what's known as volatile memory. So each cell on a memory chip, by the way,

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if you like this shirt, ltstore.com, is made up of a transistor and a capacitor.

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The transistor acts as a switch, and the capacitor either gets filled up with

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electrons, that's a one, or emptied of

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electrons, that's a zero. The problem is

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that if left alone with no power, all of

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the cells gradually lose their charge and zero out. No data left means no

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Windows boot. So, we should probably get Windows reinstalled.

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Going to use my super definitely genuine

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Windows XP CD here. Actually, that's not

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probably anymore. I have checked this. It does in fact have Windows XP on it.

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Can fix that.

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All right. So, here it is. Our whopping 4 GB of unpartitioned space. Now, you

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might wonder, why are you using Windows XP, Linus? And the reason is that it's

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actually the most recent version of Windows that will run on a 4 gig drive.

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I think I should even have about a gig left over when we're done here. All

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right. So, while that fires up, let's talk about what happened there.

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This was the first thing Brandon asked me about. This weird battery case

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looking thing over on the far right of the card. That is exactly what it is.

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And what it does is it takes the power that's being given to the card through

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the PCI slot and stores a little bit of

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it so that in the event that I turn off

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my computer, my operating system doesn't immediately

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disappear and I need to completely reinstall it and all my boot drive

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applications all over again. Now, it wasn't a perfect solution, and in fact,

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Gigabyte only rated it for, I think it was either 16 or 18 hours of power loss,

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but it did mean that in the event of an accidental power supply unplug or a

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short power outage, you weren't stuck starting fresh in Windows XP, you know,

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changing your uh I was always partial to the the chess pieces picture, you know,

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and all that good stuff. So, it's funny. I had actually intended to do some, you

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know, comparative benchmark testing between our IRAM and this old hard drive

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here. But what I realized is that once you've got the operating system

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installed on the IRAM, you've only got about I don't know 800 mgab of space

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left over. So there it's not really a whole lot to work with. Oh wow. And I

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just installed one game and it hit 365.

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Problem number two is even if we did want to do game loading times, for

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example, there's no Windows XP driver for the Titan XP graphics card. I have

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to go get another graphics card. You know what? They benchmarked it to death

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back when it was released. It's a little bit faster in terms of real world

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performance and a lot faster in terms of synthetic performance, particularly when

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it comes to random reads and writes. So

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you can see here we're at a right steady

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125 or so megabytes per second. Unlike a

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hard drive which would start at the outer edge of the platter like

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physically and then taper off in terms of performance as it makes its way to

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the data that's stored closer to the center.

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Not so here. And this is where things

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get really crazy. That access time

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literally 0.0c 0 milliseconds.

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Hard drives would be all over the place in here.

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Now, I'm just going to go ahead and restart. Oh, no. I turned it off.

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Actually, that's okay because as long as the power supply still has power, you

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can actually see there's an indicator LED here on the card. It's getting

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standby power off the slot and that's keeping the memory cells constantly

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refreshed so that they don't drain. But

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if I were to do this, it's gone. So, cool things about the

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IRAM. Really, really fast in spite of its

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interface bottleneck, especially compared to hardware that existed at the

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time. But its downfalls were of course the aforementioned interface bottleneck,

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the cludgy power loss resiliency, and

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the poor capacity. Because, you know, for sky's is the limit at any cost

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enthusiasts, something like this honestly doesn't

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even seem that crazy except that it was rated for 8 GB of maximum capacity. And

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practically speaking, there was actually no way to achieve that. Unbuffered DDR1

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DIMs only went up to 1 gig per stick. And while ECC server DDR1 memory modules

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were made in 2 gig capacities, this card

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has no support for ECC memory. And then the final nail in the coffin was, of

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course, that it was really expensive. If you had the memory lying around, and if

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you were way too lazy to just flip it on Craigslist, you could use that memory.

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But otherwise, at around $90 per stick

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at the time, you were looking at $500 to

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fully load this thing up. That is pretty steep for a five or at best 10second

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boot time or game loading time advantage. So, with the high cost and

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inconvenience as major factors, Gigabyte probably didn't make many more than the

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first thousand of these. But the IRAM was definitely a sign of the direction

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that computer storage was heading. In fact, Intel's Optane technology is a low

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latency solidstate storage tech that can now be found on memory modules just

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like, you know, they look just like these ones and used as a layer that goes

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in between conventional RAM and SSDs and servers with the added bonus of Optane

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being nonvolatile like an SSD. So, if

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you guys liked this video, maybe check out our explainer on Optane at the link

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below. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss our upcoming video

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checking out some cool SSDs from Liquid. Thanks for watching, guys. I hope you

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enjoyed this look at a really fascinating piece of retro technology as

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much as I did. I will see you guys in the next video.

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Colton.

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What? What the hell?