RAM Disk Puts New Spin On the SSD

theraindog writes "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."

Comments

What I learned from the article

[Wonko the Sane]

• Most tasks are not disk IO-bound
• Despite the fact that this device uses DDR2 RAM running at more than 6 GB/sec, it can not saturate 2 SATA interfaces
• Why bother?

Re:What I learned from the article

[NevarMore]

I'd bother, because most of *my* tasks are disk I/O bound.

Re:What I learned from the article

[Wonko the Sane]

But are you really getting your money's worth from this device?

DDR2 is an order of magnitude faster than SATA. Looking at their numbers, the internal controller is limited to about 400 MB/sec. That is pretty mediocre.

Re:What I learned from the article

[AmiMoJo]

You can get SSD cards with a PCI-e interface that hit 800MB/sec. Why RAM disk manufacturers stick to SATA I don't know.

PCI-e even has from standby power available.

Re:What I learned from the article

[Ed Avis]

Why would you spend your money on this device instead of just buying the equivalent amount of RAM and putting it on the motherboard where the processor can access it directly? Even if you had to upgrade to a more expensive motherboard you'd still get way better price-performance by doing that, rather than crippling the RAM by putting it on the other side of the SATA bottleneck.

If you insist on having a 'disk' you can save files to, well, all OSes support the idea of a RAM disk...

Re:What I learned from the article

[mcrbids]

This brings up an interesting idea. What if the ramdisk function was moved into the motherboard chipset?

OMFG! That's an AMAZING idea! This could dramatically change computing as we know it! The implications of this are, eh, well....
 
.... quite well understood. Somebody thought of this many years ago. Many, many, many years ago. It's called a (ahem) "ram disk" and uses system memory as if it were a drive with a software driver. Here's a howto for Linux - I did something similar with so-called "high memory" on a 80286 with DOS 3.x and ramdrive.sys - that 384k ram disk was small, but //FAST//!!!

Sorry to break the news to you.

Re:Why are these always so expensive?

[tulcod]

what bothers me most is that these RAM disks aren't even much faster than intel's SSD. considering the price, i think that's quite a shame. long live competition.

Re:Great for swap and /tmp

[Ginger Unicorn]

The whole thing is pointless - why not just put 64GBs of ram in your PC and let it fill it up with disk cache. This makes no sense. If you compare this thing to just putting the RAM in your PC there are NO upsides. The data is vulnerable, it's massively expensive and an inefficient use of the RAM modules. Madness.

Re:Why are these always so expensive?

[Bearhouse]

Volume. Will always be a niche product, so they have to sell it at a high price. Now, if Dell or somebody did a buyback scheme of their old PCs and recycled the memory in some kind of cheaper version of this box...