Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:39:47 GMT
I mentioned that I bought a Gigabyte GC-RAMDISK (a.k.a. i-RAM) to go in my new home file server, largely to see if using it as a solid-state log device would improve ZFS performance.
Unfortunately, I’ve been completely and totally unable to get the card to do anything at all. I’m not sure if I have a defective card or if Gigabyte’s SATA implementation is just really buggy. When I plugged it into the motherboard’s ICH9R SATA ports, the BIOS didn’t even show it on the boot-up scan and Solaris reported it as failing to initialize correctly. When I plugged it into the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8-port SATA card, the BIOS could see it but Solaris gave a similar error. Connecting it to the motherboard’s Marvell eSATA ports made the Marvell hang at bootup and made Solaris really unhappy, spewing drive failure messages all over the console.
I can’t find a single review that suggests that anyone has got this to work with a recent motherboard. Digging through the Linux kernel mailing list suggests that it has a really spotty SATA implementation. Apparently they developed it using a couple Windows drivers as a comparison, instead of actually paying attention to the SATA spec.
So, it’s going back to Amazon today. It was a nice idea, but it just doesn’t appear to work. I don’t know if it’s broken or just poorly designed, but either way it’s not useful to me.
Tags broken, gc, gigabyte, i, ram, ramdisk, ssd, zfs | 8 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 28 Jun 2005 02:28:37 GMT
Somehow I missed this earlier this month–Gigabyte has announced a $50-ish PCI card that takes up to 4 DDR DIMMs and acts like a SATA RAMDISK. It has a battery that supposedly lasts 12-16 hours and will recharge via the PCI standby power line.
I’ve seen a bunch of people excited about using this as a boot disk or a Windows paging disk, but personally I’d love to see this used as an external journal for EXT3 filesystems. For some workloads, this would result in huge performance boosts for an amazingly small amount of cash. It’d be nice to have more battery life (36-72 hours would be ideal)–my personal record for a home power outage is 13 hours. All of my work-related outages have been brief, except for the facility in Manhattan that was dark for about a week in September of 2001.
via Ambient Irony
Update: I’ve been thinking about this, and the whole thing would be massively more useful with a couple small additions. First, add a Compact Flash socket to the board, and then update the ASIC that runs the board so it will copy the contents of the RAM onto the CF card after an hour or two without power. Then copy it all back when the power comes back up. You should be able to buy 1 GB of DRAM and 1 GB of CF flash for around $150; adding $100 for the PCI card give you 1 GB of seriously non-volatile memory for $250. I’d probably make them a standard feature in every server that I bought, just for the performance boost.
Posted in Computer Hardware | Tags ddr, gigabyte, journal, nonvolatile, raid, ramdisk, sata | 1 comment
