I came across some old memory that came on ISA cards. I was just wondering if they will ever make any memory on PCI cards for people who have filled up their RAM ports.

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

Gigabyte's i-RAM storage device
RAM disk without the fuss
by Geoff Gasior — 12:00 AM on January 25, 2006

Manufacturer Gigabyte
Model i-RAM
Price (Street)
Availability Now

WHILE MICROPROCESSORS HAVE enjoyed rapid performance increases thanks to new chip fabrication technologies, higher clock speeds, and multiple cores, hard drives have struggled to overcome the mechanical latencies and challenges associated with spinning rewritable media at thousands of rotations per minute. Hard drives have picked up a few tricks over the years, growing smarter thanks to command queuing and learning to team up in multi-drive RAID arrays, but they're still the slowest components in a modern PC.

Those dissatisfied with the performance of mechanical storage solutions can tap solid-state storage devices that substitute silicon for spinning platters. Such devices shed the mechanical shackles that limit hard drive performance, but they've hardly been affordable options for most users. Then Gigabyte unveiled the i-RAM, a $150 solid state-storage device that plugs directly into a motherboard's Serial ATA port, accommodates up to four run-of-the-mill DDR SDRAM modules, and behaves like a normal hard drive without the need for additional drivers or software.

Gigabyte first demoed the i-RAM at Computex last summer, and cards have finally made their way to the North American market. One has also made its way to our labs, where it's been packed with high-density DIMMs and run through our usual suite of storage tests. Read on for more on how the i-RAM works, what its limitations are, and how its performance compares with a collection of single hard drives and multi-disk arrays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

I_RAM

Hmmm. sounds like a disgruntled Dodge person.

Released sometime before June 25, 2005,[1] the i-RAM is a solid-state drive produced by Gigabyte which has four DIMM slots to allow PC DDR RAM to be used to store data.

It connects via a SATA port and is seen by the PC as a hard drive, and may therefore be booted from directly. The i-RAM is bottlenecked by the SATA interface, which limits bandwidth to a maximum sustained throughput of 150 MB/s. This speed limitation is offset by near instant access, with latency results of 0.1 ms recorded.

DRAM however is volatile, so any loss of power will cause loss of data. The i-RAM is powered by plugging into a PCI slot, which powers it while the PC is plugged in (using standby power if the PC is off). It also has a 16 hour battery, which operates when the PC is unplugged or there is a power outage.

The i-RAM supports Unbuffered/Non-ECC DDR 200/266/333/400 MHz RAM modules of different capacities (up to 1 GiB), speeds, and brand for a maximum capacity of 4 GiB. Because of this, the i-RAM is very expensive per GB, but offers a silent storage method with higher responsiveness and performance than a traditional hard drive.

The second generation i-RAM, GC-RAMDISK, was on display at Computex 2006.[3] Rather than using a PCI slot for powering the drive, Gigabyte had implemented the GC-RAMDISK as a 5.25" drive unit powered from a 4-pin Molex connector. The drive supports four DDR2 memory modules of up to 2 GiB for a total capacity of up to 8 GiB and the interface supports SATA 3.0 Gbit/s, which doubles the transfer rate compared to i-RAM.

Although this version of the I-RAM was displayed at Computex Taipei 2006, during final revisioning it lost DDR2 and the higher capacity support. The released GC-RAMDISK[4] still only supports up to DDR-400 with a total storage capacity of 4 GiB.

I was reading about a Molex connector on a video card. I have no idea what it is.

RAM over PCI would be a bit like sooping up your car with bicycle pedals. Kinda like what happened with the ISA ram cards. Max out your RAM according to your mainboard and the slots provided and that's it for RAM.
The i-RAM stuff appears to be about solid state storage, which, actually, looks kinda interesting. (Gigabyte rox) 4 gigs o DDR400 would be a great home for an OS. And that was in 2006, according to your post.
The molex connector on a vid card is for power not provided from the main connection- (pci/agp).

We got a Gigabyte computer for our computer repair class in college. I still have the computer from 2004. I wondered why they dropped the ISA cards with memory sticks. I had an old 286 motherboard with them in them. I thought what the heck it couldn't hurt and I had to do something with all them ISA slots. The old 286 was in the biggest Gateway 2000 box I ever saw. I still think it makes a great door stop. At one time bigger was considered better.

So the OS would be in RAM like DOS 4 in ROM? Makes me think of ROM DOS.

well just buy a bigger stick baby

sweetestgirl11 bein naughty!
Often times, it's not the size of the stick but the machine it's attached to (oh, no he dit ent. yup, he sure did!)


Trout,
> So the OS would be in RAM like DOS 4 in ROM? Makes me think of ROM DOS.

Not really. From what I read, it's a storage device and appears to your sata controller to be a regular hdd. Only much faster. So, while the medium is ram sticks, it's not system ram. Thanks to a battery the data persists, as long as the battery lives, if you shut your machine off.
I wonder how/ if the technology evolved? It was an old thread I was reading. Might read up more after I'm done goofing around here.