GIGABYTE GC-RAMDISK PCI Others RAM Drive Add-On Card

Pros: Incredibly fast. Installation of RAM was a breeze. Windows recognized the drive immediately. It was formatted almost instantaneously. The battery backup is great. The lights are very cool and you do not need to guess the status of the drive, the LED's are bright and informative.

Cons: The 4 GB limit is very difficult to work with. The card is physical very large and takes up 2 PCI slots.

Other Thoughts: B/c of the limited size, I've used the card for my paging file. My performance is much improved. I have also used the drive for virtual image storage for games and VMWare O.S.'es. The O.S.'es and images are accessed with almost no latency.

Pros: I have used up to four of these, and have found it to be good for temp files.

I am how ever, waiting for the next generation of DDR SATA storage, after having bought a total of twelve brand new DDR1 1GB memory modules, I am not as excited about buying DDR2 modules _just_ for the next IRAM... If they could make one that is SATA2 300mbs and uses the same DDR1 modules, I would be very very happy.

Cons: While the IRAM it self have some short comings, I got used to keeping a daily, if not hourly backup on a hard drive.

Other Thoughts: In reply to Richard's review, I had a similar idea. What I am doing right now is using a older six pci slot motherboard with a external SATA wiring with my SATA RAID adapter. I found that it was not enough to leave the motherboard connected with power, but it needed to be powered on for the IRAMs to recieve full power.

If you want to use a IPC, Industrial PC backplane, those that have around 12 to 20-something PCI slots, it may work.

Pros: Very fast compared to any drive. We bought 12 of these when they first came out to use and temp index storage for large DBS. They work very well. One pair of them is set up in striped RAID for a total of 7.9 GB formatted NTFS. had to reformat once - reason unknown. They work.

Cons: Batteries die after 3 or 4 hours. be prepared to reformat periodically. Any memory error will cause file errors. We reformat now and then just to make sure they are OK (long format takes 4 seconds).

Other Thoughts: I am considering buying a PCU backplane and installing in separate box and using ESata for 16Gb striped RAMDISK. Should work (2 of them do).

Pros: Very fast, Blows my Raptor raid 0 into the weeds. Stable, I have had this for about 6 or 7 months now, had one crash, which is a lot more stable than my Raptors in raid 0. I can fit XP and some of my most used apps on it, I just point the data storage for the apps to another drive.

Cons: It would be nice if they would hurry up and release the 8 gig model. Some backup software can not see it.

Other Thoughts: If you want speed this is it, but always have good back ups. That goes with out saying.

Pros: Great and fanatical support/performance on the windows platform. Reboots in under 24s, runs like a bat outta ____.

Cons: Only supported in a windows environment. I've tried for the last month with numerous SATA contoller cards to confirm/disprove reported support on certain SATA chipset PCI cards instead of default motherboard chipsets. I've tried Promise, Adaptec, and the base ICH7 chipset on the motherboard, no go on all three accounts. If you want to use this on your Windows system, you're in good shape - anywhere else (forget it).

Other Thoughts: Been trying to get Giga-Byte to understand that this is most likely a firmware issue, not really a driver or defective card issue. Despite my repeated conversations with Giga-Byte, their final end to be all ends:

Answer - 434065
Answer : Since Linux is open source we do not provide any drivers for it.

Now those of you who visited the giga-byte site early on, they mentioned virtual "Plug and play compatibility with windows AND linux". This has since been removed, as users are having difficulty. Best so far - gotten Slackware 11 to mount the drive, but as read-only so I can't write files much less a partition table.

Pros: Was easy to install, has worked fine, benchmarks fast, and makes real apps work faster.

Cons: Only takes 4 gigs

Other Thoughts: Currently have 2 gigs installed: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820141429

I have 2 gigs of ram on the motherboard, so I run with swap disabled in Windows. So I use this for temporary internet files, FireFox cache, SecondLife cache, and cache space for a couple other programs.

If you want to move directories to this, that programs insist should be in other locations, find the Microsoft's Windows Resource kit. You will find a tool called linkd. Very useful to have. Some other good tools in that package as well.

Pros: Further performance testing of writing from a C program to the Ramdisk versus writing to a Raptor drive shows the Ramdisk to be 20% to 33% faster than the Raptor drive. Writing to the Ramdisk vs a 7200RPM IDE drive has the Ramdisk almost 4 times faster.

Copying a file from a hard drive to either the Ramdisk or Raptor drive shows no noticable difference in performance.

Cons: expensive

Pros: It works, but not as fast as you might expect.

Cons: By the time you add in the cost of the RAM, you have a VERY expensive 4 gig of storage.

Other Thoughts: I have timed this card on an ASUS P5WD2-E Premium m/b with 4 gig and a Presler 965 CPU. On the chipset SATA controller, the speed was no faster than a Raptor drive. On the secondary Marvell SATA controller, it was about half that speed. Buy a Raptor drive instead and get the same speed and a LOT more disk space.

Pros: 0.015ms access time, faster than any non-ram solid state disk drive on the market.
138 MB/s sustained read and 132 MB/s sustained write on my system.
Boots windows in ~4 seconds.

Cons: Low capacity

Other Thoughts: A note to anyone dissing this due to SATA I/II, ECC, etc.

First, ECC is completely unecessary and would only increase the price exponentially. It would slow performance also. Normal RAM is overkill in reliability for a harddrive
Secondly, this was created ebfore SATA II existed.
Third, PCIe wouldn't improve the speed at all: It uses SATA. PCI is only for POWER. If it used PCIe for data transfer then it would require special drivers, and not be detected as a harddrive by the BIOS.
If you can use SATA, you can use iRAM

Pros: Cheap fast solid state disk. Card only -- lets you choose your own RAM.

Cons: No ECC support -- inexcusable. SATA-I instead of SATA-II. No support for 2GB/4GB DIMM's. PCI only. No PCIe.

Other Thoughts: If it would emulate a disk controller on PCIe x8 then it could get PCIe x8 speeds -- much faster even than SATA-II. It could be 16GB with 4x4GB DIMM's but it can't do that.