Gigabyte offers cheap SATA solid-state storage
Extreme concurrency database transactions tend to be disk limited. To solve this, we've been using solid state SCSI drives for years though they're incredibly expensive. There's finally a cheaper but still reliable choice, a SATA solid-state drive from Gigabyte, a leading motherboard manufacturer.
There's a detailed review at AnandTech.
In the ISO file copy test, the card runs at 100MB/s (aka 1 gigabit). They tested many scenarios, and I noticed that the biggest gains were when files had to be read/written from different parts of the disk at same time, aka random accesses. Well, of course.
People forget that disks have moving parts. It takes a disproportionate amount of time for a disk head to move from one piece of data to another somewhere else on a disk. If you haven't seen the inside of a hard drive when it seeks, picture changing songs on a record player. You have to carefully move the needle from one groove to another, and drop it in precisely the right place. Hard drives have to do exaclty the same thing every time you access a different file, or even if one file is "fragmented" or scattered across the disk.
AnandTech notes that most users will not see an advantage. High-concurrency database users or high concurrency hosting providers are not most users. Imagine trying to play two songs at once on a record player. Most of your time would be spent in silence, moving the needle back and forth, with occasional bursts of music when you find the right spot. When a server tries to deliver two different media files to two different users, that's what's happening inside. That's why it's so hard to build a streaming media storage server that works for real-world traffic.
One catch with this i-RAM --- the battery backup is only 16 hours. In a datacenter, this is less of an issue, since the card doesn't require battery backup when the computer is "off", only when the computer or card is unplugged.
The reviewer said that Gigabyte is making "1000" of these. That's not many. Maybe Gigabyte is talking to the wrong market.