Gigabyte i-RAM

[Nox]

review up over at anandtech:

http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480

little disappointed tbh - its 'only' 20-25% faster than a raptor in most benchies.

Nox

[Jonny]

Hmmmm. Surely you need a lot of RAM to get any use out of this.

[Dougal]

Looks like this could be good for people doing lots of Video editing.

Expect to see it in those portable broadcasting vans.

[Scarlet Infidel]

A little disappointing ill agree, bu theres definite potential.

If they had a specific inteface for it so it wasnt limited by the sata interface and then they used ddr400+ ram it would be like lightning i reckon.

[Spunkey]

hmmm not quite as good as i was hoping for. They really went for the cheap option with the crappy controller, and only an alleged 16 hours of battery life which the review said was in actuality much less. Not helpful if you go to LAN parties quite often. Or ever want to move house.

Still would be kickass for a HTPC with a network connection to a fileserver *drool*

[Jonny]

Not helpful if you go to LAN parties quite often. Or ever want to move house.

Ah but you could always back up onto a regular hard drive/DVD if you needed to?

[Moby-Dick]

You could be cleaver and store the boot image for the i-RAM on the data drive ( something like http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/ woudl be good for this )

if you needed to move the machine , then snapshot to disk , then restore using a LiveCD

[Nox]

Should be Sata II interface. Or Pcie x4 and take 8 sticks.

Like the reviewer, think i'll wait for revision 2.

Nox

[Scarlet Infidel]

I wonder if ram disk technology will always be a step behind. By the time they have this to perfection we will be on Windows Vista *shudders* which will no doubt take up a huge amount of disk space (correct me if you know better). And games etc will be larger anyway.

Not a problem if you are on Linux of course.

[Spunkey]

i wouldnt think windows vista would take up that much more space. the windows core itself is only ~500Mb. Its all the crap and bloatware that comes with it which can easily be stripped away which bump it up.

Personally I'd either use it as a boot drive in a desktop, solely for windows and PS, with other drives as storage. Or as a the sole drive in a network connected HTPC.

Thing is though, is it really worth it. For $150 (which will probably be about £125 including UK markup), plus say 2Gb memory at at best £35 a 512Mb stick is about £265 total.
For that you could have 2x74Gb Raptor RAID. Which probably is not quite as fast in the IO intesive operations, but itd have 74 times the capacity at maybe 5-10% average performance hit.

[Scarlet Infidel]

Originally they stated a $60 RRP which would have been much better.

[oralpain]

I'm disapointed that no one has tested it with streaming video recoding yet. Thats the only thing I would use it for.

[webbyman]

looks good to me, and im sure performance will impove more if/as the idea is developed more