i-RAM

[oggmonster]

Guys what happened to i-ram? Has it faded? Any plans to bring it back?

[Whitehot]

I heard that it didn't take off.  Last time I spoke to Gigabyte about it they still had the DDR version and the DDR2 model was put on hold until they cleared.

shame, nice idea.

[oggmonster]

yeah brillaint idea, would be good if they brought it back especially with SATA V3.0. From the benchmarks ive seen, its actually faster than raided raptors! 

[Whitehot]

HOLY MOLY!

what happens when you pull the power though?  Does it loose everything?

[oggmonster]

Don't quote me on the raided raptor thing! It was just some benchmarks I saw...I can't seem to find the page I saw them on now...

But no to answer your question you don't loose everything it has a small battery onboard

[oggmonster]

Ohh I found what i was looking at, they didn't test it with raided raptors, but it was still faster than a 4x raid0 caviar configuration 

http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312/1

[Whitehot]

wah!!  That is impressive, the only thing that beat it was the RAID set up.  Can you imagine four I-RAM's in a RAID array??

I don't get it though, why aren't there more of these sort of things available?  And why didn't the I-RAM take off over here??  There must be some draw back that's been missed here?

[oggmonster]

I'm guessing cost? And the introduction of SSDs (again pure guesswork)

[mercyground]

With SSD's out and the fact that the I-Ram is vunerable to loss of power its a niche market.

I seriously considered getting one but was waiting for a pci-e version that was rumoured. But then of course SSD's hit.

[Badbonji]

I think raid setups are faster now, as they were limited by the bus to 150Mb/sec which SSDs can surpass now and also two hard drives in raid can match read/write speeds. Also the 4Gb limit is very small, not much room for stuff. Modern HD's fair better now as that review is 3 years old!

[oggmonster]

I know, but it just seems like a good idea. If they could build a ddr2/3 version which used sata3.0. Wasn't limited to 4GB and could be RAIDed it would be blisteringly quick!

[Badbonji]

Yeah, but I think SSD's sort of have this spot now and instead of an I-ram you need a Raid controller with 4-8SSd's. That would be amazing :O

[Greed4Speed]

Please gigabyte, bring back the i-ram

[oggmonster]

Well doubt they'll bother, see at the Revodrive x2 is out http://www.vortez.net/articles_pages/ocz_revodrive_x2_240gb_pcie_ssd_review,1.html

Which is seriously quick. Although "borrowing" the revodrive idea + improving on it would certainly be great for consumers

[Dark Mantis]

Yes I agree there oggmonster! That I would like to see them bring out.