<p>In one of my applications I have a 1gb database table that is used for reference data. It has a huge amounts of reads coming off that table but there are no writes ever. I was wondering if there's any way that data could be loaded into RAM so that it doesn't have to be accessed from disk?</p>

<p>I'm using SQL Server 2005</p>

You're going to want to take a look at memcached. It's what a lot of huge (and well-scaled) sites used to handle problems just like this. If you have a few spare servers, you can easily set them up to keep most of your data in memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memcached
http://www.danga.com/memcached/
http://www.socialtext.net/memcached/