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

ahh 1993 was a good year

[bigattichouse]

1993 was fun. A few buddies and I built out a hardware ram disk with an unused 486 and some serial cables. Granted, it didn't come in as a native HDD, or even as a linux file system, but we built a little API that made it work reasonably well in software with standard file operations and even a crappy little "directory" structure. It worked fairly well... for some reason Mondo2000 pops into my mind.

Big deal

[kisielk]

Most of the servers we run support up to 128 GB of RAM on the motherboard. Why would I waste money putting some intermediate device that pumps data over the SATA bus when I could be spending the same money on decking out the system RAM?