anything like a gigabite I-ram these days?

[Proxyep]

Does anything like a DDR3 Gigabyte I-Ram still exist? I've been searching the web and can't really find anything.

In fact these days would there even be an advantage over a high end SSD?

 

[CaptNumbNutz]

Does anything like a DDR3 Gigabyte I-Ram still exist? I've been searching the web and can't really find anything.

In fact these days would there even be an advantage over a high end SSD?

On the desktop level it does exist, in the form of RAMDrive software that has been around forever. The Gigabyte I-RAM was a niche product that only existed due to the lack of SSD's and really high density RAM like we have now. RAMDrive software was around back then, but it was mainly intended for servers that held dozen's of RAM slots and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM.

Large banks of RAM being used solely for storage and plugged in like a hard drive similar to how the I-RAM worked do still exist, but they are intended for super high end servers. They are called RamSan's. The concept is still the same as the Gigabyte I-RAM: use cheaper and higher performing DDR in massive quantities that you can't fit on a motherboard for the sole purpose of insanely fast storage. Backup in case of failure is provided by regular RAIDed hard drives during periods of inactivity.

 

[royo]

Of course RAM would still overtake any consumer-grade SSD thanks to low access time an higher bandwidth. TBH, with the cost of most SSDs now being close to 1$/GB and being powerful enough, I don't see the need for using RAM drives.