Gigabyte i-RAM Review 1/7
Bluetooth 26 Sep 2005

i-RAM

Still remember the old days in DOS, Win3.1, Win9x where you were running out of disk space and needed some swap space to compile your favourite Clipper code. Well, I was one of those who were writting those "bloated" ware where you need to link in libraries of code which you probably do not even use it in your application. Come to think of it, time flies as it was at least 15 yrs ago. At that I was using a XT based on 8088 4.77MHz. It was really a hassle to create a swap drive as there was no HDD on my system. So the next best thing I come across at that time was RAMDRIVE. Basically you load the ramdrive.sys at DOS config.sys and set aside some memory to become drive c:\ . The ram drive is actually in memory. After power down, what is stored inside will be gone.

After so many years, Gigabyte came out with the i-RAM which improves on this early concept. What it does is that it uses a daughter PCI card which you can fit in 4 DDR ram. You could use a mixture of all your old ram pieces with a max memory of 4GB. This device is attached to the mainboard SATA controller through a SATA 1.5GB/s interface. Somewhat different from the so call RAM Drive of yester year is that, Gigabyte i-RAM uses Dedicated DDR memory and not shared memory with the onboard ram. There is also data protection where by the data is preserved through the System Standby power and Backup Battery. It also supports RAID (depends on mainboard. It also has a Low CPU consumption and there is no need to install device drivers. The device is treated just as if it is a HDD. The performance is also way faster than most HDD you can find (unless it is in RAID array).

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