Gigabyte has launched the Gigabyte i-RAM, the world’s fastest storage device available to digital graphics designers and PC enthusiasts.

Housing up to four DDR RAM modules, the i-RAM has no sluggish mechanical or moving parts and employs a custom Gigabyte controller that allows the operating system to see it as a regular Serial ATA drive. Gigabyte first publicly displayed i-RAM at Computex 2005 in Taipei last year where it was hailed by many as one of the most innovative new technologies at the show.

Gigabyte designed i-RAM as a performance enhancing component for performance users who frequently use 3D rendering and video editing applications. These applications suffer from sluggish data access times associated with magnetic hard disk drives and, despite advances such as Virtual RAM disk technology, until now the PC industry has not found a viable solution that is free of critical side effects such as losing data when the system shuts down.

Recognising the potential behind solid state storage technology, Gigabyte R&D engineers designed i-RAM with two stand-by power sources that cater for the needs of professional power users and thrill seeking enthusiast alike.

Through Gigabyte’s custom intelligent controller, i-RAM accesses data at close to 1.5Gb/s - the top speed of SATA. Compatible with conventional DDR memory modules, i-RAM is outfitted with four 184-pin DIMM slots that support up to 4GB of unbuffered memory.

Power is provided through the PCI slot allowing for stand-bye power when the system is shut down. In case of a power outage or accidental disconnection from the wall power socket, a battery is provided on the i-RAM module that is charged on the fly when the system receives power again.

As a solid state device, i-RAM offers incredible reliability while at the same time delivering extremely low random access time. i-RAM apparently reached an unprecedented score of 50000 in PCMark 2004 - at least twice as fast as standard SATA hard disks in several tests.

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BIOS, Apr 10, 06 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Backup