Gigabyte I-Ram Review

Omega65

Techreport reviews I-Ram, the intriguing memory based Solid state hard drive from Gigabyte.

View: Gigabyte's i-RAM Storage Device @ Techreport

The i-RAM's greatest asset is easily its simplicity. Just populate the card with memory, plug it into an available PCI slot, attach a Serial ATA cable to your motherboard, and you've got yourself a solid-state hard drive. There's no need for drivers, extra software, or even Windows—the i-RAM is detected by a motherboard BIOS as a standard hard drive, so it should work with any operating system. In fact, because the i-RAM behaves like a standard hard drive, you can even combine multiple i-RAMs together in RAID arrays.

I'm looking forward to a 16GB version of this device with PCIe 4X/8X support

Source: TechReport

RWB

32GB ad 300MB SATA or that PCI-E spanning would be better. I really wish someone would create a better Solid State Storage device cheaply. This is our only thing right now and it's not cheap by any standards if you ask me. What can you do with 4GB? Most my games require more storage space than that. Windows for me requires more than that becuase of other programs I install like flash. 16GB at least. Per gig it's just too expencive, the card isn't a bad price actually, not great but definitly not bad for $150.

Ohh well, maybe in a year they'll come out with something way better. I'd be willing to buy a $150 card if it allowed for 16GB and the 300MB SATA at the very least.

drasnor

This seems like it would be pretty hot in a web server. I mean, your average web page will fit in that size constraint and the performance greatly exceeds that of modern RAID arrays at lesser cost. Attach it to a machine that can handle the network traffic from all those clients and you won't need as many servers for high-traffic sites. Back up hourly or daily to normal drives and you're all set.

-drasnor