Gigabyte Solid-State Storage Reviewed

EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has a review of Gigabyte's i-RAM, a relatively affordable solid-state storage device that uses plain old DDR memory modules and plugs into a standard motherboard PCI slot and Serial ATA port. Performance is generally excellent and occasionally jaw-dropping, but the i-RAM's appeal is ultimately curbed by its slower Serial ATA interface and limited capacity. Still, it's an interesting solution for anyone looking for faster I/O, and since it behaves like a normal hard drive without the need for drivers or software, it should work with just about any operating system."

Comments

Re:But the on-board battery only runs for 10 hours

[petermgreen]

only if you actually pull the plug. as long as the standby power feed to the board is on it should be fine.

10 hours is plenty enough to reset the tripped breaker or start up a generator when the power failure alarm goes off.

Re:Why use ATA at all?

[Zeio]

SATA is 150MB/sec. Standard PCI is (32 * 33) / 8 = 132 (and generally * 0.8 for overhead if other things are present on the bus so more like just around 100).

You should say use a single PCI-Express lane, 500MB/sec.

Seriously, look into things before your post - especially when using snarky expressions such as "pray tell"

Also, direct connect to the PCI bus would require (most likely) funky drivers.

IDEALLY, marvell/adaptec/lsi or others should just have a back end to one of the common non-fakeraid controllers they make be RAM instead of disks, piggybacking the existing driver support for the raid cards.