To understand why a bizarre device like this one here exists, we need to travel
back to the time of its release.
The year was 2006. High performance consumer SSDs were still 2 years away,
an eternity in computer hardware terms. And even the fastest consumer hard drive
on the market, the Western Digital Raptor X, barely stood out from the
pack. So, there was a very real appetite for faster boot devices. Meanwhile,
Intel's Core2 Duo Conro platform was one
of the most compelling upgrades for gamers in years, but it required an
upgrade to shiny new DDR2 memory,
resulting in an abundance of Castaway DDR1 memory sticks. So, there to
capitalize on these two conditions was
Gigabyte. The idea here was really simple. Here we go. Take some of the
leftover DDR1 memory that you already have lying around and instead of
spending thousands of dollars on an SSD,
take it, chuck it on this thing, and use that as your system boot drive.
I never had one of these when they were new. Back then, I was busy spending all
my money on textbooks I'd never read for a degree that I'd never finish. That
worked out great. So, when I saw this on eBay for like 30 bucks, I figured, what
the hey, let's take a look at it. Let's start with the PCI connector. Now, on
the surface, you might think that this looks very similar to a modern PCI
Express SSD, but you'd be wrong for a
number of reasons. Starting with the connector at the bottom. This is a PCI
connector and this interface capped out at just 133 megabytes per second. That
is even less than SATA 1 at 150
megabytes a second. But that wasn't even its main problem. PCI is what's called a
shared bus, which means that every device on it has to fight over that 133
megabytes a second. And thing is, many
older motherboard designs not only had their PCI slots hooked up to it, they
even had onboard devices like their built-in sound card and network
interface running off of it already. So,
this slot was only suitable to use for
power. It's also got a SATA port, so
that's how it actually communicates with the rest of your system. Unlike PCI,
SATA ports are not forced to share the same bus. So that means full performance
to this port all the time. Well, at
least as long as you don't run into a bottleneck elsewhere in your system,
like on the link between the south bridge and the north bridge. I remember
people used to hit those all the time when they were running multiple drives
in RAID zero. Now, let's talk about this
chip right here. This XYLink's FPGA
probably represents a big chunk of the cost of the IRAM. FPGAAS offer
incredible flexibility, allowing one to basically manufacture a processor in
software, then program that processor
into a blank one. Now, the cost is that
you lose some efficiency and your per unit costs go way up. If this was a high
volume product, they'd create custom silicon for it. But Gigabyte, even at
the time, admitted that their first production run was a measly 1,000 units
for the entire world. So clearly custom
silicon wasn't going to be a problem. Let's talk about why they needed this
processor, though. Fundamentally, the principle of storing data is the same
between RAM and hard drives. You got your ones and you got your zeros. But
the way the binary data is organized on
the device is completely different. A
hard drive uses a physical spinning platter covered in circular tracks that
are divided up into sectors. So when your operating system asks for a
particular bit, it tells your hard drive where to move the read head to grab the
information it needs as it goes whipping by at 7200 revs per minute. By contrast,
RAM stores bits, so zeros and ones, in
cells that are laid out in a giant grid
and that can be instantly accessed as long as you know the intersecting row
and column, which is known as an address. Well, that's exactly the
performance advantage that we're after here. But it also means that you can't
just treat this thing exactly the way that you would a hard drive. So, our
FPGA is programmed to act as a
translation layer between our SATA interface here and the memory controller
that's built into it. Now, let's look at the memory slots. These are operating at
DDR1200 MHz. And while modern memory
modules and their controllers would operate at much higher frequencies, even
with the inefficiency of using SATA instead of NVMe like we would for any
solid state drive today, that is a theoretical limit of 1.6 GB per second
between our FPGA and our RAM here. That's as fast as a decent modern SSD
and way faster than a hard drive. Well,
SATA bottleneck notwithstanding. So, let's get the rest of these RAM sticks
on here. Let's fire this thing up. All right. So, as you guys probably saw, I
already had Windows fired up on this thing before we started. So, okay, just
going to go ahead put all my RAM back into place. Let's throw this on the one
accessible PCI slot we have on this board
and fire it up. Well, that's curious. It's empty. No
bootable device. So, our Gigabyte IRAM is showing up as
our first boot device,
but we failed to boot. My device that was full not half an hour
ago is now empty. And there in lies the
Achilles heel of the Gigabyte RAM. DRAM
is what's known as volatile memory. So each cell on a memory chip, by the way,
if you like this shirt, ltstore.com, is made up of a transistor and a capacitor.
The transistor acts as a switch, and the capacitor either gets filled up with
electrons, that's a one, or emptied of
electrons, that's a zero. The problem is
that if left alone with no power, all of
the cells gradually lose their charge and zero out. No data left means no
Windows boot. So, we should probably get Windows reinstalled.
Going to use my super definitely genuine
Windows XP CD here. Actually, that's not
probably anymore. I have checked this. It does in fact have Windows XP on it.
Can fix that.
All right. So, here it is. Our whopping 4 GB of unpartitioned space. Now, you
might wonder, why are you using Windows XP, Linus? And the reason is that it's
actually the most recent version of Windows that will run on a 4 gig drive.
I think I should even have about a gig left over when we're done here. All
right. So, while that fires up, let's talk about what happened there.
This was the first thing Brandon asked me about. This weird battery case
looking thing over on the far right of the card. That is exactly what it is.
And what it does is it takes the power that's being given to the card through
the PCI slot and stores a little bit of
it so that in the event that I turn off
my computer, my operating system doesn't immediately
disappear and I need to completely reinstall it and all my boot drive
applications all over again. Now, it wasn't a perfect solution, and in fact,
Gigabyte only rated it for, I think it was either 16 or 18 hours of power loss,
but it did mean that in the event of an accidental power supply unplug or a
short power outage, you weren't stuck starting fresh in Windows XP, you know,
changing your uh I was always partial to the the chess pieces picture, you know,
and all that good stuff. So, it's funny. I had actually intended to do some, you
know, comparative benchmark testing between our IRAM and this old hard drive
here. But what I realized is that once you've got the operating system
installed on the IRAM, you've only got about I don't know 800 mgab of space
left over. So there it's not really a whole lot to work with. Oh wow. And I
just installed one game and it hit 365.
Problem number two is even if we did want to do game loading times, for
example, there's no Windows XP driver for the Titan XP graphics card. I have
to go get another graphics card. You know what? They benchmarked it to death
back when it was released. It's a little bit faster in terms of real world
performance and a lot faster in terms of synthetic performance, particularly when
it comes to random reads and writes. So
you can see here we're at a right steady
125 or so megabytes per second. Unlike a
hard drive which would start at the outer edge of the platter like
physically and then taper off in terms of performance as it makes its way to
the data that's stored closer to the center.
Not so here. And this is where things
get really crazy. That access time
literally 0.0c 0 milliseconds.
Hard drives would be all over the place in here.
Now, I'm just going to go ahead and restart. Oh, no. I turned it off.
Actually, that's okay because as long as the power supply still has power, you
can actually see there's an indicator LED here on the card. It's getting
standby power off the slot and that's keeping the memory cells constantly
refreshed so that they don't drain. But
if I were to do this, it's gone. So, cool things about the
IRAM. Really, really fast in spite of its
interface bottleneck, especially compared to hardware that existed at the
time. But its downfalls were of course the aforementioned interface bottleneck,
the cludgy power loss resiliency, and
the poor capacity. Because, you know, for sky's is the limit at any cost
enthusiasts, something like this honestly doesn't
even seem that crazy except that it was rated for 8 GB of maximum capacity. And
practically speaking, there was actually no way to achieve that. Unbuffered DDR1
DIMs only went up to 1 gig per stick. And while ECC server DDR1 memory modules
were made in 2 gig capacities, this card
has no support for ECC memory. And then the final nail in the coffin was, of
course, that it was really expensive. If you had the memory lying around, and if
you were way too lazy to just flip it on Craigslist, you could use that memory.
But otherwise, at around $90 per stick
at the time, you were looking at $500 to
fully load this thing up. That is pretty steep for a five or at best 10second
boot time or game loading time advantage. So, with the high cost and
inconvenience as major factors, Gigabyte probably didn't make many more than the
first thousand of these. But the IRAM was definitely a sign of the direction
that computer storage was heading. In fact, Intel's Optane technology is a low
latency solidstate storage tech that can now be found on memory modules just
like, you know, they look just like these ones and used as a layer that goes
in between conventional RAM and SSDs and servers with the added bonus of Optane
being nonvolatile like an SSD. So, if
you guys liked this video, maybe check out our explainer on Optane at the link
below. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss our upcoming video
checking out some cool SSDs from Liquid. Thanks for watching, guys. I hope you
enjoyed this look at a really fascinating piece of retro technology as
much as I did. I will see you guys in the next video.
Colton.
What? What the hell?