WTF is this thing? - RAM on a PCI Card??

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 two years away an eternity in computer hardware terms and even the fastest consumer hard drive on the market the Western Digital raptorex barely stood out from the pack so there was a very real appetite for faster boot devices meanwhile Intel's Core 2 Duo Conroe 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 DDR 1 memory sticks so they're to capitalize on these two conditions was gigabyte the idea here was really simple here we go take some of the leftover DDR 1 memory that you already have lying around and instead of spending thousands of dollars on an SSD take it check it on this thing and use that as your system boot drive today's video is brought to you by world of warships world of warships is the free-to-play online strategy game that features millions of players battling to upgrade their armoury of ships weapons and armor tune in at the end of the video or click the link below to learn more [Music] 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 finished 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 one at 150 megabytes a second but that it 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 guy links FPGA probably represents a big chunk of the cost of the eye ram FPGAs 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 a 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 gonna 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 readhead 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 were 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 DDR one 200 megahertz 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 gigabytes 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 out all right so as you guys probably saw I already had Windows fired up on this thing before we started so I'm just gonna 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 lots curious it's empty no bootable device so our gigabyte I Ram is showing up as our first boot device but we fail to boot my device that was full not half an hour ago is now empty and therein lies the Achilles heel of the gigabyte eye ram DRAM is what's known as volatile memory so each cell on a memory chip by the way if you like this shirt LTT store com it 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 I'm gonna 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 I can fix that all right so here it is our whopping four gigabytes 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 four 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 no changing your I was always partial to that the chess pieces picture you know all that good stuff so it's funny I have actually intended to do some you know comparative benchmark testing between our I Ram and this old hard drive here but what I realized is that once you've got the operating system installed on the I RAM you've only got about 800 megabytes of space left over so 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'd 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 hundred and twenty five or so megabytes per second on like 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 zero point zero milliseconds hard drives would be all over the place in here now I'm just gonna 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 it's downfalls were of course the aforementioned interface bottleneck the kludgy power loss resiliency and the port capacity because you know for sky's the limit at any cost enthusiasts something like this honestly doesn't even seem that crazy except that it was rated for eight gigabytes of maximum capacity and practically speaking there was actually no way to achieve that on buffered DDR one dims only went up to one gig per stick and while ECC server DDR one memory modules were made in two 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 line 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 10 second boot time or game loading time advantage so with the high cost and inconveniences major factors gigabyte probably didn't make many more than the first thousand of these but the eye ram was definitely a sign of the direction that computer storage was heading in fact Intel's octane technology is a low latency solid-state 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 & SSDs and servers with the added bonus of obtain being non-volatile like an SSD so if you guys liked this video maybe check out our explainer on octane at the link below make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss our upcoming video checking out some cool SSDs from liquid and all that's left now is to thank our sponsor world of warships is a free to play strategy action game that someone referred to as the thinking man's action game over ladies you can battle it out with over seven million players worldwide and each in-game ship is based on 3d scans of real-life ships there are over 200 ships to unlock like the historic USS Missouri and USS Arizona and with four classes of ships a bunch of upgrades weather effects and strategically designed environments the action never ends and every match is gonna play out differently submarines are also coming soon by the way which is going to offer a whole new style of gameplay and new players can use code battle station 2020 to receive 250 doubloons 1 million credits the USS Charleston 3 days of premium time one port slot and more so check that out at the link in the video description 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 Oh [Music]

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,278,493

Rating: 4.9326925 out of 5

Keywords: gigabyte, ddr1, ssd, ram, windows, pc, computer, gaming

Id: bYbCYgYZVT8

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/CCityinstaller]

I remember a guy I used to see at my local computer store who spent a TON of money on 2 of these (for him and his troll of a GF) and 4GB of ram each so they could load WoW (I guess what you now call classic lol) into them and get an edge in raids etc...

Saw him a few months later and asked him how it went...He spent a lot of time staring at the floor and mumbling about how it didn't really work out in terms of changing load times etc. .

[u/Netblock]

I was hoping volatile SSDs got more popular because there were plenty of cases where bandwidth mattered way more than data retention and capacity (swapdisk, compiled object cache, game content cache, temporary export). And there were some decent ways to improve it too: SO-DIMMs, PCIe, multislot.

But between RAM exploding in size (you got 64+GB of ram in your system), to SSDs sharply becoming faster and cheaper, why bother with a ramdisk like this literally at all? It's dead in the water from stuff like used server Xeons and dirt-cheap ECC buffered DDR3 (and dirt-cheap Threadrippers), and NVMe.

(also he didn't mention why the PCI was a 2-notch: it was a universal compatibility between 3.3v and 5v power)

[u/justanotherreddituse]

It gets weirder, there are entire computers on PCI cards. Not just a CPU, everything including RAM, storage controllers, video and audio.

https://www.serverworlds.com/sun-375-3116-1-4ghz-co-processor-with-256mb-x2134a/

[u/yaosio]

I remember that thing. Back in my old man days we saw this and thought how neat it was that it was so much faster than a hard drive. SSDs didn't exist yet, or were very expensive. I got my first SSD two years ago. It really does make everything snappy, like Thanos.

[u/got-trunks]

RAMdisk for swap when you run out of DIMM space on the board *cream*

[u/ctrocks]

I had an ISA expanded memory card on my 286. I eventually got it up to 4MB of storage from clearanced memory kits at Radio Shack. I did not have a hard drive at that time as they were hundreds of dollars. I setup the floppy batch file to copy everything over to the Expanded memory card, which was used as a RAM drive, on every boot.

Eventually I got a Seagate 52MB SCSI HDD for that system with an ST01 controller. .

[u/thedangerman007]

Very cool. I want one. A tad pricey on eBay...

They even had these back in the 80s during the end of the Apple ][ era...

http://ae.applearchives.com/files/RamKeeper.pdf

[u/MlNDB0MB]

I remember these, and my x79 board has a pci slot, so I was trying to justify getting it and using it as a write cache for random writes for my mechanical drives.

But it's just easier and faster to buy more ram and use that as a write cache at this point.