niceguyrichy

The idea behind the Gigabyte iRAM is really very simple, though that doesn’t make it any less innovative or unique in today’s market. Gigabyte took some DIMM slots, put them on a PCI card and built some custom logic that would allow those DDR modules to communicate with the system over the SATA bus without the need for any additional drivers. There are some issues that come with this kind of idea, which is probably why no one had done it before, but Gigabyte feels confident their answers to them are worthy of a retail product. In order to deal with the volatility of standard PC memory, memory costs and interface issues they made some interesting design decisions that we’ll detail as we look over the iRAM itself.

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Read the review: PC Perspective

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Matth

Interesting device, though the battery backup time is too short.

Other than the limited backup time (and ability to retain indefinitely under "ATX standby"), you might just as well fit extra system memory and use a software ramdisk.

The next logical evolution would be to equip it with an automated flash or or HD storage sweep, so it could really be treated as an insanely fast and also non-volatile device - as it stands, the battery backup of 4-5 hours is not even sufficient to cover an overnight power failure.

As extra working storage for a system already at the hardware/OS maximum for installed RAM, is probably its only current application - the suggestion of "linux swap" applies only if the system is already fully loaded with RAM and still needs more while being actively dependent on the swap.

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Mary had a little lamb,
Her father shot it dead
Now Mary takes her lamb to school,
Between two crusts of bread