you love iram (like me) ? you will be crazy with ACard

[Wrench]

Damn. I use a swap a lot, maya is a biotch about it.. This would make my life so much better.. I'd pay anything under $350

[[XC] gomeler]

If this is $200 I'll most likely buy one. It would be positively sick for PCMark activities or for reviewing. Would be sick to be able to stream my OS images from my server to this sucker at ~180MB/s, re-install Vista in a minute

[krogen]

Whats faster, iram or iodrive ?

This thing is sweet !

EDIT: nevermind, no comparison between this and iodrive

Well, according to the person from blogspot:

In ANS-9010 model, it states upto 400MB/sec transfer rate. Since SATA2 support up to 300MB/sec, ACARD uses two SATA2 ports in RAID to achieve 400MB/sec (I'm just guessing here.)

So the drive will probably be bogged down by the SATA2 interface and achieve <300MB/s. On the other hand, iodrive uses PCI-E (8 lanes or more for full performance) so it can go well over that limit (700MB read/600MB write, according to its website).

[One_Hertz]

guys only 20k iops per sata port. Nothing to see here... Iodrive is much faster and cheaper per GB of storage.

[lowfat]

guys only 20k iops per sata port. Nothing to see here... Iodrive is much faster and cheaper per GB of storage.

cost of the iodrive? And there is no where that lists the cost of this.

[DeanZ]

I wonder if ram speeds and timings will make a performance difference here

[nox_uk]

this was announced nearly a year ago

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=152513

nice to have lots of new info and pics though this is something I could go for if the price is right...

Nox

[m^2]

Iodrive is cheaper/ GB?
32 GB = $2400.
This one is $150 for a flash card + $1600 for RAM + ?? for the box itself.
Or 2x$70 + 2x$320 +2x ?? + $700 for areca 1221
Also here you don't have PCIe x4 limitation, you can make a RAID of them with (maybe..we'll see) better performance per $.
But this low IOPS is strange..has over 1/2 of Iodrive bandwidth and should have better access time.

[Neova]

I love the idea but wouldn't it be cheaper if you just added more ram to the system and partition it as a RAM drive?

The only caveat is the loading of the OS onto the RAM drive on bootup, but once its up, any reboots would near instantaneous, no? Can set the system to low power mode (turn off hd, throttle cpu and gpu, LCD) to sleep.

I would think a 2 GB stick would rock as a swap file or setup the system as a dedicated file server.

[xlink]

so now I can buy this, stick in my old DDR2 memory and use it as page file, while I use 3*512mb sticks for nehalem and still be pretty well off as far as performance goes but not loose all the money I had in DDR2 and not have to pat $$$ for DDR3.

[m^2]

I love the idea but wouldn't it be cheaper if you just added more ram to the system and partition it as a RAM drive?

Depends. If you want a mobo with more than 4 slots, you pay premium. If you want 8GB sticks...go and buy another mobo.

The only caveat is the loading of the OS onto the RAM drive on bootup, but once its up, any reboots would near instantaneous, no? Can set the system to low power mode (turn off hd, throttle cpu and gpu, LCD) to sleep.

No. RAM drives boot after system startup...so obviously you cannot start OS from them. Also, they usually need a lot of time to startup and shutdown (for reading and writing all contents from hdd, smart ones read on demand and write as soon as they can w/out waiting for system shutdown). Power loss or system crash = data loss.

I would think a 2 GB stick would rock as a swap file or setup the system as a dedicated file server.

In this case getting more RAM is better idea. If you got enough RAM, you don't need a swap file. And swap file even on such drive would be WAY slower than system RAM anyway.

Additionally, this drive should be OS agnostic, while ram drives aren't.

[GMX]

Do Crysis and Supcom need more than 4gbs of ram 0_o

Perkam

Read properly people quoting Perkam.

Amas

[tiro_uspsss]

Iodrive is cheaper/ GB?
32 GB = $2400.
This one is $150 for a flash card + $1600 for RAM + ?? for the box itself.
Or 2x$70 + 2x$320 +2x ?? + $700 for areca 1221
Also here you don't have PCIe x4 limitation, you can make a RAID of them with (maybe..we'll see) better performance per $.
But this low IOPS is strange..has over 1/2 of Iodrive bandwidth and should have better access time.

- I'm quite sure the $2400 figure ur quoting there is for the 80GB iodrive

[XS2K]

A-DATA is on the boat too here so there will be competition :X
SSD should be theoretically worser than this in performance terms since it has crappy writes...
16gigs should be enough for Windows/Vista and a game which is all I need.

[cegras]

Realistically at this point, it's good for 16GB. Most "affordable" RAM are 2GB sticks. 4GB sticks would be cost-prohibitive for another year likely. That would make a 32GB SSD a better value.

Not necessarily. RAM drives are quite simply the fastest things you can ever get your hands on. They trounce SSD's by .. I don't know, a LOT.

[WangChung]

I remembered when these were announced a year ago. They had a 3.5" version that took laptop sticks of RAM, and I cammed myself. I hope they finally release these things, I have a bead on some cheap memory to be had.

[Jimmer411]

This had better be well under $100 for me to even consider it. Ram may be cheap, but a 4gb stick of DDR2 isnt as cheap as a 2gb stick if your planning on filling this up to max. Your still looking at $1000+ easy for this sucker just for a measly 32gb.

[One_Hertz]

- I'm quite sure the $2400 figure ur quoting there is for the 80GB iodrive

Yep... $30/gb, $2400 for 80GB. Cheaper than ram itself to begin with so it doesnt even matter what the box costs. Once again, nothing to see here -more expensive per gb and a lot slower.

[kiwi]

Not necessarily. RAM drives are quite simply the fastest things you can ever get your hands on. They trounce SSD's by .. I don't know, a LOT.

Yep, RAM drive > SSD

[lionel57000]

just 2 details about iodrive

* not bootable
* not supported by windows now ....

[FischOderAal]

Too bad it wouldn't fit in my case

[clayton]

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...px?i=2480&p=10

Crazy...

[Eternalightwith]

Assuming the box was $200.

You can get DDR2 667 2gb sticks from 1st Choice Memory for 23.51 shipped.

Sooo, if you add $200 + ($23.51 * 8 sticks) = $388 for a 16Gb ramdrive.

[Zytek_Fan]

this is a hard disk aka ssd not a ram extention.

but it is volatile, so na thx im staying with flash drives. Even when they have limited wirte cycles.

plus your still limited by the sata 300 interface.

It has a battery so you don't lose the data when powered off

The RAMdrive fad has passed. We've got SSD now, so you can have an uber fast storage device. Though the cost is still ridiculously high, but it will come down eventually.

[m^2]

It has a battery so you don't lose the data when powered off

The RAMdrive fad has passed. We've got SSD now, so you can have an uber fast storage device. Though the cost is still ridiculously high, but it will come down eventually.

RAM chips are faster..an always will be. If IODrive was made to use RAM chips, it would saturate PIE 2.0 x8..if only they made a controller which could handle that much.
Storagereview expects RAM / Flash hybrids to rule in the near future. This site is enterprise oriented, but possibly we'll see this in top end desktops too.