Introduction:
Welcome to a review of the Acard ANS-9010 DDR2-based RAM-drive.
This is a review for a high-end storage component, so I feel that I have to set the expectations early: this is not a replacement for your terabyte drive, so if you start reading this expecting me to recommend it as an alternative to anything other than a super-fast SSD or 15k rpm SCSI/SAS array, you will be disappointed


Any person who had a Gigabyte i-Ram in his hands in the last few years (including myself), which is the only other mainstream RAM-based solid state drive (the term "mainstream" leaves products that cost $$$$ out of this condition) and was excited by its performance, eventually would have been through the "Why?" phase:
- Why won't Gigabyte release an updated model in 5.25" form factor, so that we are not limited by the PCI slots in our motherboard?
- Why won't they update their product with cheaper DDR2 ram?
- Why won't they update their product with one that can take more than 4Gb of ram?
- Why won't they release a SATA300 model, so that we are not capped at 133Mb/sec?
- Why won't they release a dedicated backup module for the i-Ram, now that flash memory is really cheap?
and so on.
A search in the XSystems forum for "i-ram" could show you some of the expectations people had.

From of all these "Why's", Gigabyte answered only on the first one, by releasing a 5.25" version of the i-Ram, but left all other problems unresolved.

So, before I start this review, I would like to thank Acard not just for giving me the opportunity to review the ANS-9010, but mostly for listening to us, enthusiast users, and releasing an exciting product like this.

Amongst the thousands of terabyte 3.5" drives produced daily and 500Gb 2.5" drives sold to countless everyday-Joe's, it's not very often that companies take time to listen to what this small percentage of "Xtreme" users want, need or just would like to play with, so cheers to all the R&D guys and decision makers in Acard for this product


So, on to the main character of this review, the ANS-9010.
With a 5.25" form factor, 8x DDR2 DIMM slots (64Gb max capacity), SATA300 interface, embedded battery & CF backup solution, the ANS-9010 is basically promising that it can be the fastest mainstream storage device to date.
But can it keep its promises in reality?
This is what I will attempt to illustrate through the next few pages full of benchmarks and videos.

But first, some photos of the ANS-9010