Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage

i-RAM for Applications

Gamers aren't the only ones plagued by long load times. There are a handful of applications that do take a reasonable amount of time to load that could be benefitted by being installed on an i-RAM card.

We tried a wide variety of applications, everything from Office to Photoshop and 3ds max. What we found was the following: for the most part, the majority of applications are as fast as they are going to get on any current-generation SATA drive. We noticed no performance difference loading any of the MS Office applications on a Raptor or on the i-RAM card.

Application Load Time Comparison (Lower is Better)
	Adobe Photoshop CS	Microsoft Outlook 2003	Microsoft Excel 2003
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)	3.537s	2.51s	1.654s
Western Digital Raptor (74GB)	6.037s	2.562s	1.765s

The biggest differences that we saw were obviously with applications that took a long time to load to begin with, one of the most popular culprits being Adobe Photoshop CS (we didn't have CS2 available at the time of testing).

On a WD Raptor, Photoshop CS took about 6 seconds to load; it's not much when you time it, but it can feel like an eternity when you're actually sitting there waiting for it. The i-RAM cut the load time down to 3.537 seconds, a significant reduction, and very noticeable.

The major issue with the i-RAM and using it to install our applications on it, once again, becomes size. But it is entirely possible to keep a handful of your very frequently used applications on the card, giving you faster access to them.