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

Pros: really easy set up.
cheap answer to 4Gb XP limit.

Cons: mid size card, needs some spacea round it, but not too demanding

Overall Review: Really easy to install. You need one free PC slot, with some space around it, and one free SATA port. fit the Ram (for me 4 x 1Gb Kingston DDR400 ram as recommended by Gigabyte) then installed the card in its slot, boot up, and its instantly recognised as a disk. didn't need any drivers or disks.

then just follow the same procedure as any normal new disk- go to Disk Management> Format and Initialise. give it a drive letter and you are away.

I just point Photoshop to it as my primary Scratch disk and now I have an extra 4Gb RAM for PS, as well as my regular system ram.

you can also point Windows Virtual memory file to this and make a set amount for that.

There is a CD included, but no idea why its there, and didn't need it.

Pros: When this worked, it was really fast and I was able to take advantage of it on multiple fronts. It shaved 5 seconds off of my boot time and when playing various online games maps loaded faster than usual. Marks were at a sustained rate of 131MB/sec on my onboard controller.

I moved my page file, temp internet files, temp folder, java cache, and gimp scratch area all to the disk. Sure most of this could have been done with a software ramdisk, but this performance was better and recognized as a disk at system boot versus being loaded during Windows startup.

Cons: The DIMM slots are really tight, had a tough time with a stick or two of RAM here and there. Just ensured that I used the recommended RAM in the end to avoid compatibility issues.

The battery onboard is either defective or does not work as advertised. I initialized the ramdisk and let the battery charge for a good 48+ hours. Once I went to a LAN party, the disk data went bye-bye and everything had to be reinitialized.

First DIMM slot was defective and the rest of the slots died shortly afterwards. The disk constantly required reformatting and the overall capacity dropped twice before it would no longer format. RMA time for me....

Overall Review: I was debating on what type of system upgrade to purchase and I decided upon this one for a few factors. Although the cost was equal or slightly greater than other options, I selected this one due to the fact that I could always port it to another system in the future. I figure this will be pretty good over the next three years versus a 939 CPU upgrade, DDR 1 upgrade, or a SATA disk upgrade.

I still want to test booting Windows from the ramdisk. I would also like to evaluate performance using onboard SATA II controller versus a dedicated PCI card.