I-RAM

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The correct title of this article is i-RAM. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

For other uses, see Iram.

The i-RAM is a solid-storage solution produced by Gigabyte which has four DIMM slots to allow PC DDR RAM to be used to store data. It plugs into a SATA port and is seen by the PC as a hard drive, and may therefore be booted from directly. RAM offers vastly faster transfer rates compared to traditional hard drives; 3-5 GB/s is standard; over 25 times faster. Whilst the i-RAM is bottlenecked by the SATA interface, it is still much faster. RAM however is volatile, so any loss of power will cause loss of data. The i-RAM avoids power loss by plugging into a PCI slot, which powers it while the PC is plugged in (using standby power if the PC is off). It also has a 16 hour battery, which operates when the PC is unplugged or there is a power outage. The i-RAM supports Unbuffered / Non-ECC DDR 200/266/333/400MHz RAM modules of different capacities (up to 1GB), speeds and brand for a maximum capacity of 4GB. Because of this, the i-RAM is very expensive per GB, but offers a silent storage method with higher responsiveness and performance than a traditional IDE harddrive.

1 Advantages
2 Disadvantages
3 Second Generation i-RAM
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Advantages

Fast transfer rate
No moving parts
Silent
Lower cost than traditional solid-state drives

[edit] Disadvantages

High cost compared to traditional hard drives
Low capacity (4GB)
Restricted by SATA I bus (150MB/s)
Takes up two PCI slots
Adding additional memory wipes the data from all sticks
Not physically compatible with all DDR RAM modules due to tight spacing

[edit] Second Generation i-RAM

The second generation i-RAM, GC-RAMDISK, was on display at Computex 2006 [1] [2]. Rather than using a PCI slot for powering the drive, Gigabyte has implemented the GC-RAMDISK as a 5.25" drive unit powered from a four-pin molex connector. The drive supports four DDR2 memory modules of up to 2GB for a total capacity of up to 8GB and the interface supports SATA II, which doubles the transfer rate compared to i-RAM.