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: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.