Gygabyte i-RAM-- RAM based 'harddrive'

[DaMaN]

It seems as though gigabyte is finally sending these out to tech sites for testing/reviews. (Blade, knock knock) Main power is from the PCI slot with a 16 hour back up battery and it connects through the SATA ports [RAID arrays ] It supports a maximum of 4GB of DDR, target price is expected to be around $50



http://www.hkepc.com/hwdb/iramdisk-gbt-1.htm

it's in chinese so windows may ask you to install a language pack you can [it will ask you for the windows cd] OR you can cancel and it will still load but the characters will be all fubared. If some one can get it translated and post it I would appreciate it =).


anyway.. just look at the pretty pictures and benchmarks


--------------------------Gigabyte i-RAM ----- Seagate 80GB 7200rpm 8MB Cache
HDD Score ------------57699 ----------------4122
XP Startup ------------102.193 MB/.s ------7.348 MB/s
Application Loading -100.503 MB/s -------5.918 MB/s
File Copying ----------118.981 MB/s ---------31.152 MB/s
General HDD Usage -90.620 MB/s --------4.915 MB/s


on sustained transfers regular drives rates differ depending on where on the platters data is located, the RAM drive is a constant 133MB/s and acces time is 0.1ms [actually basically instant but ms is the lowest the benchmark programs read

[Badmojo]

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/ with chinese Traditional works

getting a little lost on the SATA... it connects to drives or Mobo(as a ramdrive),reading it a second time Im thinking the second. With the second you could RAID two cards
Homer: mmmm RAID arggrrgghhhhhh

[EvilHorace]

It'd be nice to find that page in english but it looks very interesting. I may be wrong here but it looks like for about $50, you plug that it using your existing ram (or are you adding even more ram?) and see a huge increase in HDD transfer speed?

[DaMaN]

Adding additional ram to create a ram disk.

[ZYFER]

yeah, it has 4 slots, so you can buy DDR Ram (up to 4 gigs) which is about all you need for the OS, this would be excellent for server operations, or for a Gaming Server particular in which the game server software doesn't exceed the required space, also makes Virtual Memory more efficient

Also, it is not as if you can't have more then one of these in your system either

[DaMaN]

Puts a whole new twist to multiple OS's I guess.

[sheerdark]

OMG...that is too awesome. I NEED this for my carpc

[VooDoo]

nm

[Badmojo]

found some new info http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_10064.html
It connects via SATA onto the motherboard so it doesnt use the PCI for data transfer and it doenst connect to a HDD incase of battery death to restore files.
So who wants super RAID to bad they take up 2 slots =(
if they dont use the pci for bios/booting info you might be able to (mod)build external serial drives for these