Ironically HyperOs have released a 64GB £269/$399 drive....looks very similar to the Acard too.......lets play spot the differenceThis is just after this months custompc magazine review put a "crazy but cool" and ""recommended tag on the Acard 9010 and 9010B. The older HyperoS drives cost in excess of £1200 and used registered PC2700 DDR1 memory.
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
Last edited by RADCOM; 11-24-2008 at 11:51 AM.
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Respec'
System:Bunch of crappy overclocked PC's that cost an arm and a leg
We are looking at the same place. Look at this page:Originally Posted by Spoiler
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15931/7
It dips down to 50-60mb/s. Do the test on josh's setup and you will see 150+mb/s. I do not see how you can call that comparable performance, but maybe that is just me. Windows boot time would be A LOT faster on the ram drive and program load time would be somewhat faster.
I might be looking at this the wrong way, but I figure the ACARD would be a tad faster than the old i-RAM. With that reasoning, I woud imagine the Intel SLC SSD would be right around the same speed in game/system load times. Take a look here at the i-Ram boot and load times :
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312/3
I know it's not a fair comparison, but it give us a good idea.
The ACARD 9010 does seem like a real screamer though. I thought about purchasing one last week, but nobody had them in stock. Lucky for my wallet I guess.
ACARD should be about 2x faster than the old IRAM (which was limited by the PCI bus)... Although there is nothing to back that up, just what I think.I might be looking at this the wrong way, but I figure the ACARD would be a tad faster than the old i-RAM. With that reasoning, I woud imagine the Intel SLC SSD would be right around the same speed in game/system load times. Take a look here at the i-Ram boot and load times :
http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312/3
I know it's not a fair comparison, but it give us a good idea.
The ACARD 9010 does seem like a real screamer though. I thought about purchasing one last week, but nobody had them in stock. Lucky for my wallet I guess.
Nope, not limited by the PCI bus, as it doesn't use that to transfer data, just supply power. It connects via SATA1, same speed as the ACARD now appears to (even in SATAII mode). So they are almost on par in performance. That's the disappointment, really, that 4 or 5 years of massive tech advances hasn't produced a faster RAM drive, simply becase it's being bottlenecked by poor interfacing.
Well, well. That IS a comedown from their crazy stupid prices on the old models. But for my money, with otherwise identical specs (and it IS odd, look at the design, and the spec for transfer rates!) the ACARD wins with the quasi ECC feature. It's just more reliable over time as long-term storage.Ironically HyperOs have released a 64GB £269/$399 drive....looks very similar to the Acard too.......lets play spot the difference
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
The IRAM was not limited by the pci bus, but limits by sata I. The acard uses sata II, so should not be as limited there, but look here:
http://www.wideopenwest.com/~dcason6634/Acard.html
comparable
Nox
I could be wrong but i believe they are just reselling the Acard produced device and possibly have pictures of slightly different revisions of the same device.
I see two IRAM devices being put against one 9010? The benchmarks are right in this thread as well. 270mb/s versus the 135 of the iram. Access times should be similar.
The ACARD has a similar streaming speed to the i-RAM PER SATA PORT. The bigger model has two SATA ports which you can access separately, each offering half the installed RAM as a disk device. So two ports in RAID0 is roughly equivalent (a little faster) to two i-RAMs in RAID0. If the single-port option is used, then you will get a disk the full size of the RAM, so bigger but not much faster than an i-RAM.
Who the heck is talking about the one port version? It is pure garbage more or less. The fact remains, the proper version is 2x faster than the old IRAM.
NO, it's not. You are missing the point. It's not about the unit, it's the fact that you have to use TWO SATA ports to interface to the bigger unit in RAID0. So equating this to a SINGLE i-RAM that interfaces to a SINGLE SATA port is just ludicrous. It's also twice the cost and takes 2 to 4 times the memory.
Using the bigger unit in two-port mode is effectively having two half-size units similar to an i-RAM each, needing the same interface requirement, so it's only fair to compare this to two i-RAMs similarly RAIDed.
Last edited by IanB; 11-25-2008 at 11:30 PM.
The point is, it *should* be twice as fast per SATA port!!!! The SATA II on the acard appears to be no faster than the SATA I on the IRAM, well OK a little faster, but certainly not up to double the speed. That ACARD is like having two IRAMS in one box, near enough, and it should be faster, nearer double the speed. If you use your sata ports on your mobo, you could plug in 2 acards, or twice as many irams, net result - roughly the same, give or take.
The REALLY annoying thing is I was holding off for this tech, and may still get one, but the top end SSD's are starting to get into the same ball park for comparisons, if you take into consideration capacity and retaining data i'm now leaning towards those... If I do get an acard, then I can see it being used as a page file drive to try to help the lifespan of any ssd's i get. Had the ACARD been released 2 years ago, or even 1 it would of been a no brainer...
Nox
The price of the single port ACARD device is pretty nice, it's just too bad the maximum transfer rate through that single SATA connection isn't anywhere close to the theoretical maximum of SATA II.
As someone posted earlier, it sounds like the ACARD controller isn't fast enough. I saw something about another ACARD device coming out scheduled for early next year. Could this be a revision?
if it is, it's just in time for SATA III(or whatever they plan to call it)
Nox
As it's been already mentioned (i.e. 1 post aboveif it is, it's just in time for SATA III
Nox), it's a fault of ACARD, not SATA2.
Intel could get well over 200 MB/s from the same interface.
yep, which is pretty much why i'm leaning towards SSD at the moment...
Market on this area is changing so fast though I do plan to wait 6+ months, see where things like the iodrive and this are standing compared to SSD's when the dust begins to settle. Was very tempted with a couple of OCZ Core V2's, or could get 3 or 4 now for the same price as one of these & eight 2gb sticks... then again the v3's are around the corner...
Nox
Do you not have any empty sata ports? What is your point? What does it matter if it uses another one? Equating two hardware devices to one and saying that it is the same is ludicrious. Why dont you take two 4850s put them into CF and say that 4850 is comparable to 280gtx(which would take up the extra slots with its huge cooler)?NO, it's not. You are missing the point. It's not about the unit, it's the fact that you have to use TWO SATA ports to interface to the bigger unit in RAID0. So equating this to a SINGLE i-RAM that interfaces to a SINGLE SATA port is just ludicrous. It's also twice the cost and takes 2 to 4 times the memory.
Using the bigger unit in two-port mode is effectively having two half-size units similar to an i-RAM each, needing the same interface requirement, so it's only fair to compare this to two i-RAMs similarly RAIDed.
If it costs pretty much the same and gives pretty much the same results, then it's not ludicrous.In both cases the single box is merely more convenient.
As others have just pointed out, this isn't revolutionary tech, it's barely evolutionary tech equivalent to putting two i-RAMs in a box using DDR2. For the market it's aimed at (boot device), no-one would use a single i-RAM, it's too small, you have to RAID anyway to get a usable drive size. So the comparison is obvious. The killer feature here isn't the streaming speed as we might have hoped, it's merely the memory capacity and ECC feature, and a neat integrated backup gizmo.
nox_uk is right, it's still a great product, but there's nothing here that couldn't have been produced years ago, and it may be too late to make a niche with faster and cheaper SSDs widely available. And since I have two i-RAMs, there's simply not enough difference in the performance to justify a switch to this.
Last edited by IanB; 11-26-2008 at 11:29 AM.
I would say my 4870x2 is more comparable to two 4870's in crossfire, than one on its own...
cost is near enough the same, performance, near enough the same, just one takes up half the space and is more convenient...
Nox
Josh (and whoever else)... Have 24 gig and a 32 gig flash card installed and running on the 9010 via ICH9R. Was a little trouble at first, but smoking now. Holy smokes, the flash card backup takes FOREVER! I will try to post some relative times, but definitely going the way josh did for fulltime power backup. What an awesome kit, but really want to go for the full 32gb.
Wade
I was just browsing the memory compatability sheet listed on ACARD's website. It looks like more sticks have been added!
I was backing up a 8GB ramdisk on shutdown (to the hard disk) and it'd take roughly 15 minutes. Most CF doesn't write nearly that speed (even though it wasn't a particularly fast HDD) and you might be dealing with more than 8GB of storage.
C2SBX w/Q6600 @ 3.0 gHz 1333 mHz FSB 2GB RAM
ANS-9010 has 24GB of ddr-2 800, and a 32mb Transcend CF card (133x)
After playing with the ACARD for about a week now, I pulled my two I-RAM box drives out, and left in my Platypus Qikdrive8. I may end up pulling it too when my last 8GB for the ACARD shows up this week. This drive is everything I had hoped for. OS is XP sp3 w/ all recent patches, Office 2007 Enterprise, Adobe Reader 9, WinRar 3.71, assorted Malware, Symantec AntiVirus corporate, video and sound drivers, etc. All major applications are on a WD Velociraptor 300GB.
Wade
Interesting, I'm not hyper impressed by the HDTach numbers. That's a dual sata RAID 0 so it's actually 140 per sata port. Not drastically better than the raptor (or a pair of raptors with a small fast OS partition). I understand the random I/O capability is the key here, but it just doesn't seem compelling given the cost-to-capacity issue compared to the raptors or even several SSDs out now. I DO like the ECC function for data protection. To me that's a primary selling point. Something a typical RAID 0 or single drive would not enjoy the benefit of. An array of these would certainly be impressive, but so very expensive.
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