[TechReport] ACard's ANS-9010 Serial ATA RAM disk - Overclock.net

Cheetos316 · 01-21-09

Quote:

Solid-state storage from another angle

Solid-state storage is the new hotness. Of course, that hotness is relative—this is still the storage market we're talking about. Think less Scarlett Johansson and more Tina Fey. Nonetheless, the recent almost-affordability of blazing-fast flash drives has been an interesting development in the storage world. And it's getting even more interesting, because in addition to an entire family of flash drives, the SSD market also has a crazy uncle.

The focus of most solid-state storage discussions centers on flash-based solutions, but they're not the only game in town. DRAM chips offer solid-state storage, too, and they're widely available on plain old memory modules. What's more, even Intel's fastest X25-E flash drive is limited to 250MB/s reads and 170MB/s writes, but your average DDR2-800 DIMM can read and write at up to 6.4GB/s. That's like lining up a 40-horsepower motor ripped from a Vespa against the W16 monstrosity that powers the Bugatti Veyron.

Of course, you still need a way to get DRAM chips to behave as a hard drive. The hardware to do so was initially offered only for high-end servers and workstations, and it was priced accordingly. Then, about three years ago, Gigabyte went out on a limb with an i-RAM storage device that allowed users to plug four DIMMs into a PCI card that hooked up to a standard Serial ATA port. The i-RAM was ridiculously fast, and for most intents and purposes, it behaved exactly like a normal hard drive.

The original i-RAM's total capacity was limited to 4GB of DDR SDRAM, so it's not particularly useful by today's standards. However, a company called ACard has done one better with the ANS-9010 RAM disk, which has eight DDR2 DIMM slots and support for up to 8GB of memory per slot. The ANS-9010 also features a pair of Serial ATA ports, allowing it to function as a single drive or masquerade as a pair of drives that can easily be split into an even faster RAID 0 array. Can this latest RAM disk live up to its staggering performance potential, and perhaps more importantly, could you live with it as a primary hard drive?

source

The rest of the review is at source. Seems pretty impressive, considering it can compete with Intel's SSDs and with DDR2 sticks so cheap and plentiful, it might be a good deal. If only the MSRP can come down a tad bit....

acadiancrusader · 01-21-09

wow

lordikon · 01-21-09

Considering that RAM is about 20x faster than Intel's SSD, I'm surprised that is barely faster than the Intel SSD in most of the tests. And to be honest, that really isn't any cheaper per GB, and requires battery power to save it from losing all the data, so there is no way in hell I'd want my OS installed with this thing.

zomgiwin · 01-21-09

so uh, whats the price tag? lol

DjQurt · 01-21-09

its like 379 usd

DjQurt · 01-21-09

why dont i just get ramdisk? then pop in a couple more sticks of ram in my own pc

Gr3m1in · 01-21-09

i personally think the testing was really let down by the test system and not testing it with a dedicated raid card

there is so much potential in the design though like the ability to back up to CF etc that makes it incredibly awesome as a benching drive etc since your pretty much always reinstalling your OS etc for new tests and for each new mobo etc your testing

all youd need to do for the day is install the OS tweak it how youw ant it then back it up to CF, then if you corrupt the install or need to reinstall etc its much faster than reinstalling from scratch etc

but the things letting this drive down could potentially be the controller chip, a good controller chip and dedicated raid card would potentially let this destroy ALL current SSD's imo

kneeki · 01-22-09

I origionally found this post at /.,

Quote:

"Although the solid-state storage market is currently dominated by flash-based devices, you can also build an SSD out of standard system memory modules. Hardware-based RAM disks tend to be prohibitively expensive, but ACard has built an affordable one that supports up to 64GB of standard DDR2 memory and features dual Serial ATA ports to improve performance with RAID configurations. And it's driver-free and OS-independent, too. The Tech Report's in-depth review of the ANS-9010 RAM disk pits it against the fastest SSDs around and nicely illustrates the drive's staggering performance potential with multitasking and multi-user loads. However, it also highlights the device's shortcomings, including the fact that SSDs are more practical for most applications."

[source], Direct link to article

urgrandpasdog · 01-22-09

Of course, the problem with these is, if you lose power, there goes your data....

EDIT:
Well, I stand corrected, it does have ways of retaining your data.

aksthem1 · 01-22-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by urgrandpasdog

Of course, the problem with these is, if you lose power, there goes your data....

You did read the article right...?

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[TechReport] ACard's ANS-9010 Serial ATA RAM disk

01-21-09	#2 (permalink)
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