Gigabyte to introduce $60 solid state harddisk PCI card

[kahheng]

Infoworld news

If you're a Photoshop power user, you should be excited about this for obvious reasons.

US$60 for one of these is unheard of. RAM, as we know, is really cheap these days.

July 2005 delivery. No specs yet on the Gigabyte site.

:thumbsup:

 

[willyfoo]

Hmm... very interesting...

 

[Nerd]

Whoo hoo! Finally! An alternative from Cenatek's Rocket Drive which was retailing at $300 ++ USD?

$60 is a damn good buy. I'll be getting one of this for my desktop. Populate it with 4 pieces of 512 mb ram. Video / photo editing ought to speed up a lot!

 

[Del_CtrlnoAlt]

its a bit risky lor... just what if there is a power cut off for 12 hours? you have to redo the entire windows installation again...

my guess is that it wouldn't be exactly that cheap... $60 bucks for the casing, convert to sgd with watever increments, $120, den 1g ram about 300 each shot, so 1.2k with 120, so 1.3 to 1.4k..

unless that can find a way to use alternative memory, something with speed of Dram, but able to store like ROM... would be something i'd like to see.

 

[kahheng]

its a bit risky lor... just what if there is a power cut off for 12 hours? you have to redo the entire windows installation again...

my guess is that it wouldn't be exactly that cheap... $60 bucks for the casing, convert to sgd with watever increments, $120, den 1g ram about 300 each shot, so 1.2k with 120, so 1.3 to 1.4k..

unless that can find a way to use alternative memory, something with speed of Dram, but able to store like ROM... would be something i'd like to see.

What are you talking about? Oh I see, you mean the way Gigabyte is promoting it's use or is that the stupid Infoworld journalist's take on how the card can be used (with a name like Sumner Lemon, whaddya expect? Sounds like an Onion reporter). No one in the right frame of mind would use it for anything mission critical the way the article suggests. Speeding up boot up speed? What a dumbass application for a ramdrive.

I am thinking of using it as a PS scratch disk. This thing is useful for those who've maxed out their ram and who still run things off their harddrive scratchdisk too often. Also, a lot of mainboards AFAIK are not stable with more than 2 sticks of RAM and having a solid state drive as a scratchdisk is fairly useful again here.

BTW, it's the cheapest solid state harddisk solution ever. I reckon it will be about S$1.1k for a 4 gig ramdrive. Crucial Patrol PC3200 is about S$240 a 1 gig stick, if it can use it that is. Solid state harddrives don't usually require the latest or fastest memory types. Hey maybe PC2700 can also be used.

Hmm, I'd want to wait for some reviews first. Gigabyte doesn't even have specs for this thing on it's website to say the least. ;-)

(Now I want to go write Intel support to see if my mainboard can support 4 sticks of 1 gig...........)

 

[NMSS_2]

Whoa! sounds very exciting. how much more ram do we need for winxp? or even longhorn?

 

[Kho King]

must have continous power supply to the card, or the battery can only last 12 hours. Do u really want to risk your computer loosing all the data?

 

[NMSS_2]

quite ok for those always on their mains.

 

[Kho King]

quite ok for those always on their mains.

what happen if power fails? I still think not safe... :nono:

 

[NMSS_2]

what happen if power fails? I still think not safe... :nono:

reinstall windows loh! :sweat:

what are the chances that black out is over 12hours. :think:

 

[+evenstar]

Happy with my current configuration, WIN XP startup only takes 40sec.

IBM T43 with 2GB RAM

 

[CrashWire]

You could always ghost your Windows installation just in case.

 

[grantyale]

oops...I don't really see...$60 + 4xDDR module isn't that cheap right? And you're feeling handicapped with onboard 2GB RAM? Beats me.

 

[kahheng]

oops...I don't really see...$60 + 4xDDR module isn't that cheap right? And you're feeling handicapped with onboard 2GB RAM? Beats me.

Yes, beats you :bsmilie: If you don't get it, you never will.

 

[kahheng]

Happy with my current configuration, WIN XP startup only takes 40sec.

IBM T43 with 2GB RAM

No one spends a few hundred bucks just to speed up bootup with a device like this :bsmilie:

 

[Nerd]

its a bit risky lor... just what if there is a power cut off for 12 hours? you have to redo the entire windows installation again...

Not many people is going to use that as their main hard disk. Those who do, will make sure the thing can last 1 week on batteries using whatever method they can lay their hands on. There's always RAID 1 for data redundancy. You'll only give up 4 Gig on your main hard disk for redundancy, so I don't see it as an issue at all.

I believe 50% of the people will be getting it for their photoshop scratch disk or whatever program that needs huge amounts for their scratch disk, 10-15% may get it as their "main hard disk" and they will do a RAID 1 to protect data integrity. I don't see how much slower it'll make the system as the RAM Drive doesn't need to wait and the Physical hdd can slowly update along as the system runs.

 

[NMSS_2]

Happy with my current configuration, WIN XP startup only takes 40sec.

IBM T43 with 2GB RAM

nothing beats a desktop for a speed demon! :sticktong

 

[Firefox]

Interesting pricing... Of course, it doesn't offer the 8GB capacities nor the lower latencies of a Platypus.. But at $60 vs US$8000, I wouldn't mind... If only it had something like 12 DDR-DRAM slots..

 

[pethidine]

I think this may be a better alternative!! Save your monies!!

Samsung develops flash-based 'disk' for PCs

 

[Drudkh]

Irony, 60 times faster than a harddrive and uses SATA? Wow, I didn't know it can exceed SATA's speed @ 60 times faster!.