Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Gigabyte’s Solid State Storage Examined. Gigabyte i-RAM Review Hits the Web

1:43 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

Performance is something that is never enough for enthusiasts. While performance of modern microprocessors, memory, graphics cards and some other components increased dramatically in the recent years, hard disk drives (HDDs) remained to be relatively slow, despite of certain speed gains.

On the end-user side there are a number of ways to increase performance of a storage sub-system:  install an HDD with faster motor or create RAID array of fast HDDs. While both cases will add performance, there is one more way to radically boost the speed with the i-RAM, a storage device based on random access memory chips, according to Gigabyte.

“Gigabyte’s i-RAM storage card is no doubt one of the more innovative products that we’ve seen in months. Although the card supports only four DIMM slots, it has the potential to house up to 4GB of DDR400 memory - enough to store an entire installation of Windows XP with enough space for a couple more applications. The card’s concept is simple, use standard memory modules available today to build a so-called RAM disk. At first glance, the card does remind us a little of memory cards used in high-end server systems. On closer inspection, you’ll see that it has a single SATA port which lets you connect to any SATA ports found in most motherboards today,” explains HardwareZone.

“The card is not based on any common chipset and it utilizes a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA (Field Programmable Grid Array) chip as the main memory controller. This means that the board’s controller is solely customized by Gigabyte’s research engineers. The memory controller is connected to a JMicron JM20330 Serial ATA single-chip controller. The JM20330 chip is actually a PATA to SATA bridge and this indicates to us that the board is likely not fully SATA native. Thus, it really depends a lot on the throughput rate from the memory controller although it could theoretically max out at Ultra DMA-150 (which the JM20330 could support),” claims the web-site.

• HardwareZone: Gigabyte i-RAM.

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