Gigabyte I-RAM DDR PCI Virtual RAM Disk Drive SATA W/ Backup Battery

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Ive been using this drive as the play/pause cache for VMC TV recording and pausing. Tried Windows XP on this drive, very fast bootup. So now I've decided to install Linux distributions of Ubuntu and GeexBox as a network media center and desktop. Man, I can't tell you how fast Linux boots compared to Windows. GeexBox, minus posting, is basically an instant-on PC. I would only suggest this product to people who already have 4GBs of RAM to dump into this unit, not using Vista, and want a totally silent PC. Oh, I also have to say that I have made an image of my 4GB I-RAM drive and stuffed it onto onto a USB flash drive. In the event of the I-RAM memory getting wiped out the USB drive gets booted and auto-re-images the I-RAM drive.

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I picked this up for a Photoshop Scratch Disk as well as a Visual Studio Build drive, however I have had to uninstall it until I get my system plugged into a network rather than wireless. It seems as though it interfers with the Wireless card in some way.

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well i got this little baby about 6 months ago and its pretty sweet, i have used it as a windows drive, a windows page file/swap drive, and a drive to install games/apps on.Useing the drive for windows/apps allows for a very short load time but you will see little improvement over a standard drive when running around in explorer.Useing the drive for page files or swap partition is just like putting more ram in your system.Loading games off the drive does is not all that faster then my raptor 10k sata.i found a little app called drive speed test from exibition software here are the results."drive speed comparison" testI-Ramwrite 371 megabitsread 294 megabitsSata raptor 10k rpmwrite 122 megabitsread 291 megabits"single drive detailed check" testI-RamWrite a 1 Megabyte file: .593sRead a 1 Megabyte file: .485swrite a 10 megabyte file: 5.922sread a 10 megabyte file: 4.906soverall write speed: 48,375 kilobytes/soverall read speed: 37,37,451 kilobytes/scopy a 10 megabyte file: .594sdirectory lookup (10,000 files): 1.344sfile delete (20 megabyte): .016sin conclusion this drives strenght is in its write speeds and access times, you will see great improvements in applications that wright to disk a lot, or deal with a large number of small files/cause a lot of fragmentation on the drive.my suggestion would be to hold off getting this product if your a gamer, just pack your box with ram.If you are a doing some kind of photo editing, video editing, some kind of data base/server, or maybe compiling things this might be right up your alley.This will be a great product when they increse the drive size and do something to fix the bottle neck with the sata bus

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I bought this on a whim one day and so far I guess im somewhat happy with it. I put 3 1gb sticks in it, plan on getting another one soon. I installed windows on it, and after a installation of windows with drivers and all the little bits like adobe acrobat reader, and the like the windows loading screens little bar only goes halfway before I am in windows. But i noticed if i have my dvd burner plugged in it takes way longer, not sure why, could be the motherboard, but I rarely use my dvd burner anyways so I leave it unplug, and if I need it turning of the computer and plugging it in takes less then 30 seconds.Its been pretty good I guess, i had to get rid of my virtual memory because it would eat up half my drive, but I have 2gigs of RAM so its no big deal.As for 3dmark scores i did a little test, installed 3dmark05 on the iram, and again on a 250gb seagate. Scored 1343 on the Iram and 1346 on the seagate(this was on a 6200tc, my 7600gt that I normally use caught on fire)Although this really isnt a fair test because if I wanted to be really precise i would have installed windows on the 250gb seagate and benchmarked it there as well.Is it work the 150 for this plus 300 for 3gigs of ram? Probably not. Is it impressive to have really short bootups? Hell yes. Once vista comes out I think this harddrive will help alot, assuming that vista will be able to be shrunk to fit on this 4gig harddrive. I used nlite to my windows cd and shrunk it a bunch because of the small size of the iram.On a side note this thing puts out quite a bit of heat, but it doesn't effect my system because my motherboard is inverted(i have a lian-li v2000b plus) and i stuck it in the last pci slot so the heat rises and doesnt effect my videocards and such.