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Gigabyte i-RAM storage device

Thursday, March 30th, 2006 | Hard Drive Reviews, News

Hard drives are always a bottleneck in the computer system. The mechanical nature of disks means there needs to be a physical movement of the platter inside to find the correct spot on the disk where the information you need has been stored.

Although they have gotten much faster with spindle speeds in such disks as the Western Digital Raptor reaching 10000RPM and transfer rates of up to 300MB/s available, this is still a far cry from the speeds available from main memory and the computers processor’s onboard cache.

The Gigabyte I-RAM intends to make up this area with a product that doesn’t break the bank like solid state drives do, but to offer a good balance between pricing and speed for slightly more permanent data storage than memory, but much faster speeds than those obtainable from a hard drive.

It takes 4 sticks of DIMMs to fill out the memory requirements. They are attached to the card which goes into a PCI slot. It connects to a SATA connection which is where the data is transferred. Storage is only semi-premanent, with a battery holding data if the computer is reset, but can only hold it for a few hours at the most.

The drive itself compares well to ordinary drives in tests at hothardware.com where it beat other drives hands down in all but buffered/burst speed tests.

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