Lots of the posts here seem to lack research. There are solutions out there that use ram drives and have enough battery power to run for 10 hours when the PC is turned off. BUT they also have the ability to copy data to the laptop drive you attach to it each time you turn off the PC. This means that as long as you don't physically pull out the power cable it will boot up pretty much instantly and you won't losse any data. If you do turn off the power then it will just have to load from the hard drive into the memory (so taking no longer than it would currently take with just a drive).

Also in reply to voshkin - do your research - most ram drives connect by using a sata cable, so even the bios sees it as a hard drive, meaning they are fully compatible with windows, osx and linux.

I can't wait for the new I-RAM drive to arrive - fast storage for the masses at a very low price

But then you could never turn off your PC...

For 32bit Windows OSes, you can *supposedly* (I have yet to try it, I need 2GB more RAM) enable PAE, which will give you access to all your RAM.

"PAE is an Intel-provided memory address extension that enables support of greater than 4 GB of physical memory for most 32-bit (IA-32) Intel Pentium Pro and later platforms."

It works similar to the old page-swapping trick in DOS.

So those of you lucky enough to have 4+ GB, try it out and let us know how it worked.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

32-bit xp can access more than 3gb ram, it just can't assign more than 3gb to a single process. you'd also be limited to 3gb per ram drive you create, just enough for a xp install and one game. Windows can address a large amount of memory though, you could put a large swap file in the ram disk, which is known to work well.

While the 32bit CPU and OS have support (via PAE) to access >=4G, the motherboard might not.
A lot of motherboards claim to support 4G but they actually report 3G to the OS.

so if you installed windows to a ram drive, you could then operate a computer w/out an hdd?

..an awful lot of the DRAM you'll find these days is already below 65nm - typically 55 or 50nm (or other values depending on how the manufacturer is quoting the process, e.g. min gate length) - memory design/production tends not to follow the main-stream ASIC process sizes directly.

How will your drive work, if the OS cannot address the RAM in the first place?
nice idea, but do some research beforehand.

It's not an entirely fair comparison, since RDRAM was a complete change of design, but the situation is the same. Why go for DDR3 now when there is a perfectly adequate and dirt cheap alternative available?

Unless there is a significant change in price of DDR3 (downwards) or DDR2 (upwards) then DDR3 is dead. People will end up waiting till the next memory technology supersedes that.