TurboRam, the Revenge! :D

We all know the jokes about the Intel TurboRam card. God knows I've poked enough jokes at it myself. Well... I just stumbled onto something strange that I'm hoping one of you will want to look into to verify what I found.

Here's what I'm running for a system:

Gateway 6750 (CPU upgraded to T7500)
4GB of RAM
Updated to latest BIOS
320GB WD Black HD (7200rpm/16MB cache HD)
Vista Home Premium 32-bit

Yesterday I upgraded the HD from the original 250GB WD HD (WD2500BEVS) to a new WD3200KTRTL 320GB HD. I'm pretty religious about updating my drivers, but for whatever reason I could never install the latest Intel drivers. It'd always make the machine sluggish and unstable to the point of locking up, especially if I had a Turboram module installed.

On a whim I went to Intel's page to see if they released a new TurboRam driver. I pulled the sucker out a few months ago (and downgraded to the default Intel Storage Matrix drivers provided by Gateway), but I wanted to see if Intel was actually updating the thing. Sure enough, there's a new version that's been recently released.

After some minor hair pulling I finally Ghosted the 250GB HD to the 320GB HD (hint: You need Ghost 12.0 or newer, or else you'll need to do a repair using the Vista boot CD). I defraged it afterwards using jkdefrag and kicked the tires. Yeah it was definitely faster than the older WD2500BEVS, but not as fast as I was expecting.

Call it morbid curiosity, but I downloaded the new TurboRam driver and figured I'd re-install the TurboRam module (1GB) just to see if it'd actually work without crashing my system like it used to.

Just a little back-history here: it NEVER worked before. When the system crashed with the card installed before, it used to take anywhere from 1-3 minutes before Vista would even start booting again (even with the updated BIOS for my system). I had to literally rip the card out and revert the storage drivers to the ones that Gateway installed on the system before it would behaive normally again.

Ladies and gentlemen... this makes absolutely no sense, but not only is the thing working now, it's measureably faster. I checked several times because I thought I was seeing things.

Before installing the latest TurboRam driver, I re-ran the WEI test just to see what the score would be on the HD. After running the test about five times, the score never went higher than 5.6 (believe it was 4.8 or 4.9 with the WD2500BEVS). After installing the card and new TurboRam drivers and checking it five times, it bumped up the WEI score to 5.7. Not a HUGE increase, but an increase nonetheless. I didn't time it, but Vista appears to boot faster now too than before the card was installed.

That issue I had with Vista taking 1-3 minutes to start booting after a system crash? I guess the card must clear the contents of the TurboRam chip when it detects a dirty shutdown; the system would display a message just before the Vista booting screen (with a counter). It whips past that in about 15 seconds now.

Here's the thing (and where one of you willing souls comes into play). Since I installed the card at the same time as the new HD and the TurboRam drivers (which have a much more up to date Matrix driver than the one I was using), I can't be 100% sure that the speed increase is due to the updated TurboRam driver, the TurboRam card, the updated Matrix driver that came with the TurboRam driver, or some other factors:

- The original WD2500BEVS HD was 5400 RPM, 8MB cache, SATA 1.5 and didn't support NCQ (from what I can tell). The new 320GB WD3200KTRTL HD is 7200 RPM, 16MB Cache, SATA 3.0gb, and supports NCQ.

- The updated Matrix drivers may just not have liked my old HD, but play nice with my new HD...

- Intel's finally fixed the blasted TurboRam drivers so it's actually useful now.

In short, if you got one, give it a spin with the new drivers and see if it makes any difference to your system. In my own case it no longer kills the speed of the machine and it's actually stable! :laugh: In the interest of science I'm going to try and remove the card to see if it makes a negative difference too.

 

I'm doubtful, WEI is a terrible indicator of performance. My hitachi 7k320 also scores a 5.7 and i don't have turbo ram.


Maybe its booting faster simply because of the new drive.

 

The new drive will have a big effect on load times. The seek times (which really affect boot up) are lower on 7200 drives simply because the disc spins faster.

The other thing about the TurboMemory is that, yes, Intel have updated the drivers since the V1 days and they are a lot more stable than they used to be. I run a V2 module in my G71V and it does make a difference, especially when having to use battery power.

 

My system:

T7500 2,2Ghz C2D
4GB RAM
Vista Ultimate x64
320GB Seagate 7200rpm 16MB NCQ SATAII HDD
1GB ITM 1.0 module

the intel turbo memory noticeable speeds up my system, esp. boot times. Also, I save a lot of battery-time with ITM installed, due to the ReadyDrive function. ReadyBoost does not do a whole lot for my system as I have 4GB of RAM. When I was using the system with 1GB of RAM, it was nearly useless without the ITM module.