i-RAM boot format

[Ian_B]

I am in the process of designing a long-overdue computer upgrade. One of the things I am looking at is the GigaByte i-RAM, which is a card that can take 4GB of DDR RAM but has a SATA interface implemented with a custom ASIC so that it looks just like a hard drive to the OS. Throughput isn't as fast as you'd hope for being RAM, because it's only implementing 150Mb/s SATA (not even SATA II), but the access times are nice...  :bg

It's a very interesting idea, but IMHO GigaByte are marketing it completely wrong. They have added a battery module so that the contents don't disappear on shutdown, with the idea that it can be used as a fast startup drive. My take on it is the opposite. People are spending fortunes on software to give them privacy that attempts with varying levels of success to clear browser histories, pagefiles, etc., and this would work perfectly if set up as a 4GB temp drive that was effectively wiped on shutdown and clear on every startup.

For instance, this is actually how I run my system. I have an OS partition on one hard drive (no pagefile or TEMP/TMP environment variables), and on another separate drive I have a 4GB temp partition that holds a fixed-size pagefile, my Temporary Internet File folder and is the target for all my temp environment variables. The temp files can be easily wiped with a batch file on startup. Having this pagefile partition on a separate physical drive from the OS does have a small speed benefit when both are being accessed simultaneously, obviously. Having it in a RAM disk instead would bring even better benefits and possibly reduce disk wear and tear for common activities like browsing too.

The catch with this idea is that as supplied the i-RAM has no BIOS, it really is just an ASIC and a bunch of RAM. This means that AFAICT from the reviews and technical info I can find, if you turn off the machine without the battery backup on, it boots up as just a bunch of RAM - it isn't formatted as a disk! You have to do that explicitly before you can use it. So to make this idea work I need to be able to access the i-RAM and force a format early in the Windows boot-up procedure, obviously AFTER Windows has loaded drivers for SATA and other necessary hardware, but also BEFORE it starts accessing the pagefile, as if there's no disk formatted to put it on as per the registry setting it'll reset this and all the temp variables to defaults or throw an error.

It occurs to me that there is a special startup section for stuff like this - I've seen Norton tools and Windows itself, when low-level disk tests have been scheduled, start up in a non-graphical mode before continuing to boot properly, presumably after drivers have been loaded but before much else. Is there a way to force a little format prog to run here? Or would I have to think about writing a device driver?  :'(

Any thoughts and suggestions on this appreciated.

IanB