Hi All,
I have always wanted a hardware ram disk to play with, and when the Gigabyte I-RAM came out I was amazed at the performance that was possible with this device. These days its performance is not that great in comparison with SSDs. The reason for this hack/mod was because I recently had to rebuild the RAID array in my home server after a drive failed, since this was an opportunity to update to ZFS, I took it. After learning about ZFS and how you can provide it with even a small USB (slow) cache disk for massive disk performance improvements, I decided I would see if I could obtain a 2nd hand I-RAM.
After a bit of searching I found one supplier in the US that had a brand new I-RAM listed as unsold stock, I snapped this up for $40USD. I already had 4x 1GB DDR modules from an old upgrade (Yes, I hoard), so I did not have to purchase those. Next problem was that my server has no more PCI slots remaining on the board, they are all in use. After a close look at the I-RAM (about 2 seconds), it was very obvious that the device is only powered from the PCI slot, there are no signal lines connected except for RESET.
I dug out an old faulty motherboard (yes, again, I hoard stuff), and did my best to de-solder a PCI slot. Now I realise I could have just soldered onto the I-RAM, but I would like to keep the card in good condition, it is an item of interest

. I got the PCI slot out, but lost 1/2 the pins in the process, which was no big deal since we only needed to provide the +12v, +5V, +3.3V and ground connections, and there were enough pins remaining for this after rearranging them

.
It should be noted that this thing has a battery on it, and charges it, also DDR can be pretty power hungry, so to be sure I could supply enough current every ground and voltage pin must be connected (later I confirmed this theory). In total about 20 pins had to be wired up, and a small DC-DC switch mode regulator to provide the +3.3V rail.
After plugging in a test card (random PCI sound card) to ensure there were no faults (there were, had +5v shorted to GND), I installed the I-RAM into my adaptor. LEDs came on... great! After noting that it draws 1.2A, I was glad I opted to connect every power pin. Next I wired up the Molex connector and attached it to the PC, lights came on, and an extra one came on when the SATA cable was connected, but no joy, the PC would not see the device. I did a quick double check of things and I decided to pull up the RESET pin to +3.3V. Success, the device was now accessible.
[618884.466560] ata6: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
[618884.467076] ata6.00: configured for UDMA/133
[618884.467084] ata6: EH complete
[618884.467186] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA GIGABYTE i-RAM 8 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[618884.467398] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[618884.467409] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] 8386559 512-byte logical blocks: (4.29 GB/3.99 GiB)
[618884.467561] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
[618884.467565] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[618884.467647] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[618884.469121] sdd: unknown partition table
[618884.469430] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk
Now as I said earlier, the I-RAM is nothing to brag about these days, benchmarks show a consistent 120MB/s and 0.1ms access time. Any decent modern SSD can outperform this device, but the down side of the SSD would be the write life as the I-RAM should electrically fail before it hits any write limits, making it the perfect RAID-Z cache device on a budget.
Since these photos were taken I have covered the connector pins in hotglue to prevent any shorts or movement as this connector has seen better days after my treatment of it while de-soldering (levering out with a crowbar?) it

. I have also clearly marked the front end of the connector as the card can be plugged in backwards, don't want to blow it up should I need to change things later

.
xen:~# zpool status
pool: datapool
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0 in 5h45m with 0 errors on Sun Jan 11 07:45:19 2015
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
datapool ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-WDC_WD40EFRX-68WT0N0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXXX-part2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-WDC_WD40EFRX-68WT0N0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXXX-part2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-WDC_WD40EFRX-68WT0N0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXXX-part2 ONLINE 0 0 0
cache
ata-GIGABYTE_i-RAM_XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ONLINE 0 0 0