Gigabyte I-RAM is the closest you can get to a commercial Solid State harddrive. I-RAM is a PCI expansion card with 4 DDR slots that can house up to 4GB DDR400 memory through four 1GB memory modules. Gigabyte has worked its way through several versions of the unit during the development and v1.3 seems to be the one it is going to sell and at GamePC they’ve taken the time to test this memory harddrive. With the regular harddrive tests the access times are the ones standing out, or what do you say about an access time at 0.1ms, instead of 7-8ms for the fastest SATA harddrives (Raptor). Something that looks even more impressive are the I/O tests though, they seem completely marvelous with a Solid State hardrive.
Gigabyte I-RAM performs very well overall and you can clearly see the advantages of Solid State harddrives. They also test I-RAM as the primary drive for the operating system with good results, the big problem is of course the cost and not the least the capacity at at most 4GB. But it’s getting harder and harder to keep the emotions at bay when you see these kind of results.
“Gigabyte’s I-RAM is one of the most unique and interesting products to come through our labs in quite a while. Upon its arrival, everyone who was aware of what the unit was became curious of its abilities, and wanted to witness what it was capable of. The I-RAM gives us a unique look into the future of storage, a future without heads and platters, where storage is lightning fast and dead silent.”
