ACARD DDR2 RAM Disk

[Denithor]

News release

ANS-9010 $399
Two SATA connectors, Raid0 capable (double bandwidth capacity)
Supports up to 64GB DDR2 (8x8GB sticks)

ANS-9010B $249
One SATA connector
Supports up to 48GB DDR2 (6x8GB sticks)

 

[BoboKatt]

Not much info as of yet out there. I found some reviews by googling it. Seems rocket fast tho..

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

Yeh, pretty much any ramdisk will saturate i/o bandwidth. Raiding them, in some cases, doesn't improve performance. A lot of the bottlenecks are in a sata/raid controller's processing ability, as many of them are designed in consideration that conventional hdds cannot use all the sata bandwidth. Also, the internal i/o and processing abilities of the ramdisk itself.
I will tell you this though- I've read a lot of reviews on the gigabyte iram, and even ddr1 has enough throughput to saturate sata bandwidth.
Do these things work w/ ECC-capable ram?

 

[faxon]

once SATA 6GB/s is released these things will probably make a much bigger difference performance wise than they do now. i still wouldnt want to use one for data storage though, volatile ram on a battery doesnt mean the data is safe

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: faxon
once SATA 6GB/s is released these things will probably make a much bigger difference performance wise than they do now. i still wouldnt want to use one for data storage though, volatile ram on a battery doesnt mean the data is safe

It seems to indicate that it backs up and restores to a compactflash card inserted in the front. I don't know how or when it does that, however, since it says it is driverless. So perhaps it loads on power-on, and saves on power-off, hopefully the battery lasts long enough to save!

 

[her209]

Very very tempting.

 

[Denithor]

Wish we could get a review of these drives. Jaw-dropping performance shown on their website, wonder how they would bench against SAS 15k drives, 10k Velocis and the Intel MLC/everyone else's SLC SSDs.

 

[tynopik]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
It seems to indicate that it backs up and restores to a compactflash card inserted in the front. I don't know how or when it does that, however, since it says it is driverless.

it does a backup/restore automatically at power loss/power on or manually whenever you push the button

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
So perhaps it loads on power-on, and saves on power-off, hopefully the battery lasts long enough to save!

that's what the battery is there for

they also sell an external power adapter to the memory remains powered even when the computer is off so you don't have to wait for a restore from CF when booting

 

[davecason]

I bought an ANS-9010:
http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-batcar.jsp#

Prices are listed.

Sample results running both SATA ports in RAID0 against two iRAMS:
http://www.wideopenwest.com/~dcason6634/Acard.html

They are just slightly faster than an iRAM... but they have more slots and use DDR2, which is dirt cheap.

 

[Denithor]

Nice work there, Dave!

Could you give us some random write graphs? That's where I think these drives are going to totally rock.

Biggest advantage will probably be capacity. 4GB limit on the i-RAM is too low to be of much use. Even populated with 2GB sticks one of these would hit 16GB which is more useful (example: rip 8.5GB DL DVD and encode to 4.5GB SL format all on the one speedy drive).

 

[davecason]

Pick your poison:

Is there any particular benchmark you would like me to run to test the random writes?

 

[Denithor]

Get some ideas from here and the following pages. I'm really curious how it stacks up against that Intel SSD so those benches are what you want to compare to anyway.

 

[davecason]

I have to get a compatible video card: my server is running a 6-year-old remote management card (Megarac G2) that doesn't cut the mustard for that software.

In the mean time, enjoy the following complements of Acard:
http://www.acard.com.tw/english/newstabpop.jsp?idno=87

I can tell you that in my testing, I am getting 180MB/s in single drive mode using RAID0, 240MB/s using dual-drive mode (as shown in my Web page) and only a little over 300MB/s using dual-drive mode and 2 iRams to make a 4x4GB RAID 0 array. I suspect that my RAID card is a limiting factor (Promise ex8350).

 

[davecason]

Another article:
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16255/1

I read the article but they didn't test with very good hardware (less than nice RAID controller). I bought a pair of Dell Perc 5i cards and upgraded their firmware with the latest LSI MegaRaid 8840E version which really made them cook. See chart number 4:

http://www.wideopenwest.com/~dcason6634/

You definitely need a decent SATA controller to get the most out of one of these.