During this week’s episode of .NET Rocks, Richard Campbell was talking about the Gigabyte i-RAM and how he can boot Windows XP in a matter of seconds.  This piqued my curiosity, so I dug a little deeper and discovered that this is a relly neat solution!  Gigagbyte’s product is a PCI card that pulls power off the computer’s bus, but in all other regards works as an SATA drive.  The card actually has an SATA connector that you cable to your controller.  On the card, there are 4 slots for DIMMs, each capable of holding up to a 1GB chip.  So together, you end up with a 4GB drive that runs blazingly fast (theoretical 1.5 Gbps?).  What I found really fascinating about this product is that it has a 12 hour battery to hold your data in RAM if your machine is unplugged.  Initially, I thought “What if you turn off your machine?”  Apparently, PCI slots still receive some power when the machine is turned off, so that doesn’t fall back on the battery.  Combine this with some decent drive imaging software to occasionally create snapshots of the drive onto a hard drive and I think you’re pretty safe!

Pricegrabber lists prices for the i-RAM starting at $110.  Add on four 1GB Non-ECC DIMMs ($80 or so a piece) and you have a pretty sweet solution for under $500!