Son of iRam getting close? (Acard SSD)

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heelix

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 2, 2004
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The sales guy over at Acard pinged me today. Looks like a possible November release... No details on performance or cost details, but I've been waiting for a DDR2 based RAM drive.

Looks like the base model has one SATA 2 port, 6x DDR2 slots, CF card slot for backup, and battery.

The other has two SATA2 ports, 8x DDR2 slots, CFcard slot, and battery.

* IOPS 20,000 per SATA port
* Data transfer rate up to 200MB/sec, 400MB/sec for the 8x slot version (RAID-0 for that?)

http://www.acard.com/english/fb0101.jsp?type1_title= Solid State Drive&type1_idno=13

Anyhow... will update as I get more information. I'm planning to run this with 2G sticks, if it is even close to reasonable.
 
Looks sick, hope it supports 8Gb sticks! That would be awesome: a 64Gb SSD for (hopefully) much cheaper than the ones out there now!
 
djBon2112 said:
Looks sick, hope it supports 8Gb sticks! That would be awesome: a 64Gb SSD for (hopefully) much cheaper than the ones out there now!
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Yep it supports 8GB sticks.


*dies* Man I can't wait!!!!
 
Igthorn said:
Heh, look up the price of 8gb DDR2 sticks.
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Yes, but they're also new technology. Looking at how fast prices for even 4GB sticks have dropped, I'm really hoping the same thing happens.

Failing that, 8x4GB is still 32 GB, pretty respectable for a system drive.
 
djBon2112 said:
Yes, but they're also new technology. Looking at how fast prices for even 4GB sticks have dropped, I'm really hoping the same thing happens.

Failing that, 8x4GB is still 32 GB, pretty respectable for a system drive.
Click to expand...

32gb is more than reasonable IMO, especially if you want to just go for benchmarks. Also, Raid is another option *tim allen laugh "ho ho ho ho"*
 
That's actually pretty smart with the CF card.

Sounds neat, but expensive enough for me not to own one... lawl...
 
200 MB/s? That's terrible. RAM can do 2 GB/s easily, yet the interface is so limiting.
 
Looks awesome. Too expensive for my blood at the moment but it looks like it'll scream.
 
I have an email at home saying the MSRP will be $499.

I really like the product... except the price. Bit more then I can swallow. Here's to hoping the price comes down. Or for the "Geek" model to come out.
 
It doesn't matter what they do with these things, they'll never go any faster than the drive interface allows (IDE or SATA). It might sit on a PCI card, but it's not piping the data directly into or directly out of the system RAM at actual RAM speeds, so... get ready to spend a shitload of cash for hardware that can be beat across the board in all reads and write speeds - based on the interface - but not in that random access time.

The cost of these pieces of hardware + the cost of populating them to any useful degree = you're wasting your money.
 
I love the idea but as others have said. The price point just isn't reasonable considering you still have to populate it with TONS of memory.

I question if you are looking for a solution like this why not create a ram drive, get a mobo that supports lots of memory, stuff it full and have fun. Of course creating an OS boot drive wouldn't probably be an option in this case...

I'll stick with my Velociraptor for now... This things screams at a fraction of the price. :)
 
Joe Average said:
It doesn't matter what they do with these things, they'll never go any faster than the drive interface allows (IDE or SATA). It might sit on a PCI card, but it's not piping the data directly into or directly out of the system RAM at actual RAM speeds, so... get ready to spend a shitload of cash for hardware that can be beat across the board in all reads and write speeds - based on the interface - but not in that random access time.

The cost of these pieces of hardware + the cost of populating them to any useful degree = you're wasting your money.
Click to expand...

The only way to solve that sata issue is to use more of them I guess, virtually separate the capacity and let the MB raid them.. The 8 slot model has two but the XS thread doesn't say any thing about how they are used together.
 
Hypernova said:
The only way to solve that sata issue is to use more of them I guess, virtually separate the capacity and let the MB raid them.. The 8 slot model has two but the XS thread doesn't say any thing about how they are used together.
Click to expand...

In other words, as I said, the cost of the devices + the cost of populating them becomes absolutely ridiculous. Grab two Velociraptors and have fun... or even a handful of SSD drives and RAID 'em together. The overall price-to-performance ratio will blow these iRAM devices clear off the planet surface...

Sad, really, because I've been a proponent of actual RAMdisks for decades now. Hell, I used to boot my Amiga 500 off a RAMdisk, so I've seen pretty much every attempt at making such devices as the iRAM that have appeared, and they all suck, period. They just can't do the job adequately and keep the price-to-performance ratio anywhere near a reasonable level.

I built a RAID 0 box for a small image studio 2 weeks ago, a new startup here in Vegas that is making waves. They wanted a "demo" workstation to see what's possible for processing as they don't want to create a massive server-type situation in the office, but 3-4 workstations that are equal in performance and then just using simple file sharing as required. Very simple setup in terms of the network, but the workstation I built used 2 300GB Velociraptors (tried to sell 'em on SSD but the amount of data they're dealing with wouldn't be practical - again, a price-to-performance and ROI issue).

The hard part was getting them to spring for 16GB of RAM because of the cost, but a few weeks ago I saw that sale for 4 4GB sticks of RAM for about $450 and made a few phone calls and snagged a similar deal.

I set up Photoshop CS3 for 'em (their legit retail copy) on Vista Business x64. They started messing around with it, loading some rather large TIFF files in excess of 150MB a pop, several at a time, performing some basic scripted actions on 'em, blurs, filters, etc. Using the Velociraptors in RAID 0 meant very snappy and consistent performance, as well as having 16GB of RAM too. Also, it's a Q6600 based machine running rock solid at 3 GHz.

They were very pleased with the performance at that point, but I had a surprise for 'em. ;)

I asked if I could have 20 mins 'alone' with the workstation to "rewire it" as Tim Allen might say. That consisted of grabbing a trial version of SuperSpeed Software's RamDisk Plus 9 and installing it, doing the simple configuration, and then creating a 10GB RAMdisk and told Photoshop "Ok, you want a scratch disk? Here, try this on for size."

After I did some tests of my own using the same scripts they'd done earlier, boy... I tell ya. You haven't lived till you see 225MB TIFF files literally snap onscreen in the blink of an eye, multiple huge TIFFs with resolutions like 5000x5000 and even higher. That's what's possible with RAMdisks, because even Velociraptors in RAID 0 pumping out something like 280MB/s sustained pales to the close to 5GB a second in bandwidth of that RAMdisk.

I told 'em to come back in and rerun their test scripts.

Jaws hit the floor, folks. Well, not quite but figuratively speaking, at least.

They asked what I'd done, I told them I put the scratch disk in RAM where it should be if you have the RAM to make it happen, and they bought 4 licenses of RamDisk Plus 10 mins later, and I got a signed contract to construct 3 more workstations identical to that one top to bottom and also be their "geek" if any issues come up.

It was a very good week... ;)
 
True that, although these new drives are a steal compared to Hyperdrives. Not every MB can support 16GB at high speed so I think a 16GB iram may still be be reasonably priced for a scratch drive. The price jump beyond 2GB sticks is the main limiting factor here IMO.
 
JoeAverage, I'm sure everyone that frequents these forums are aware that you like real RAM disks, and time and time again you talk about how fast they are while what people are looking for is a way to boot off of them, which you do not have a solution for.

When you can make a proper RAM disk appear as a harddrive to the motherboard, and have a solution for making it non-volatile, then I'll run out and buy as much RAM as I can possibly fit in my computer.
 
I had an iRAM for all of a month and sold it. 4GB was useless and it was slower than my current RAID arrays (except for access time of course).

This provided cheap enough would actually make sense. I'm glad someone made a product like this.
 
It would be great if they would compare the performance differences from different setups.

Using different speed rams, different size, vanilla/raid-0.

I'm also curious about the pickyness of the device when it comes to ram brands/models/speed.
 
spazoid said:
JoeAverage, I'm sure everyone that frequents these forums are aware that you like real RAM disks, and time and time again you talk about how fast they are while what people are looking for is a way to boot off of them, which you do not have a solution for.

When you can make a proper RAM disk appear as a harddrive to the motherboard, and have a solution for making it non-volatile, then I'll run out and buy as much RAM as I can possibly fit in my computer.
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No offense, but if all you give a shit about is booting your PC off a RAMdisk, you've got a long way to go. :)

I can make most any machine boot in under 20 seconds easily, and to be honest, why people even bother turning their PCs off anymore is beyond me. Boot speed is truly irrelevant in the big scheme, and it sure as hell doesn't matter one bit with business clients with agencies that are staffed 24/7 anyway.

Throw a shitload of relatively cheap RAM in 'em, slap on a RAMdisk and configure it AND the OS properly and the first day of usage pays for it in increased efficiency that's orders of magnitude higher, faster turnaround for their clients, and it just benefits everyone from start to finish.

As for the non-volatile aspect, RamDisk Plus can mirror itself to actual hard drive storage using write caching when the system is idle (most of the machines I build rarely are, but even so). While there is no perfect non-volatile memory system because the OS itself can always crap out in a nanosecond flat, the boxes I build with the recommended UPS hardware (APC, forever and a day) gives the clients I have the fabled 99.999% uptime as long as the OS itself and "reboot required" updates are kept out the equation.

I thought most of you folks would understand this by now... ;)
 
Joe Average said:
No offense, but if all you give a shit about is booting your PC off a RAMdisk, you've got a long way to go. :)

I can make most any machine boot in under 20 seconds easily, and to be honest, why people even bother turning their PCs off anymore is beyond me. Boot speed is truly irrelevant in the big scheme, and it sure as hell doesn't matter one bit with business clients with agencies that are staffed 24/7 anyway.

Throw a shitload of relatively cheap RAM in 'em, slap on a RAMdisk and configure it AND the OS properly and the first day of usage pays for it in increased efficiency that's orders of magnitude higher, faster turnaround for their clients, and it just benefits everyone from start to finish.

As for the non-volatile aspect, RamDisk Plus can mirror itself to actual hard drive storage using write caching when the system is idle (most of the machines I build rarely are, but even so). While there is no perfect non-volatile memory system because the OS itself can always crap out in a nanosecond flat, the boxes I build with the recommended UPS hardware (APC, forever and a day) gives the clients I have the fabled 99.999% uptime as long as the OS itself and "reboot required" updates are kept out the equation.

I thought most of you folks would understand this by now... ;)
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If it does this in a very automatic fashion, I may be interested. By that I mean, on boot, it auto loads into RAM disk. On shutdown, it auto unloads, etc.
 
That's exactly what it does, but if you're meaning it "autoloads" the OS itself, forget it.

http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php has all the info you might want. It even "images" the data in the RAMdisk during shutdown and restores it on bootup using compression - just like True Image or Ghost are capable of. How cool is that? :)
 
It seems you just don't want to get it JoeAverage :)

Not everyone has the same usage pattern as your clients. Not everyone has their PC manned 24/7.

Yes, most PC's can boot in 20 seconds, but why not make it 10? Some just want that snappy feeling in their OS, not having to wait for installs of applications because they're pretty much instant if the source drive is fast. Heck, some might want it for the silence.

The fact that you don't understand why some people might want to turn off their PC's once in a while makes me suspect that your arguments are meant for an entirely different audience than what is present here on these forums.


And I respect what you say and all, but you need to remember that most people here (I hope and think) do not use their computers in the same way as your clients. And while that superspeed application is rather nice, and I'm sure it's well made, it's not capable of what I'm sure a lot of users would want: Make the OS boot off it :)
 
Average Joe has some good points, to use this device as a bootdisk is way too expensive (4gb sticks are way too expensive atm, probably always for the DDR2 version)

When read the idea for an scratch disk, I thought thats really interesting, even 4x2gb (or even 6x2) ddr2 of the cheapest ram .

I was wondering if it could work with a the swap file of windows vista.

Another idea is to use it for a database

maybe someone else hase other ideas?
 
Saying that a piece of hardware is too expensive is very generalizing, don't you think? Having a SAS subsystem would be too expensive for my mom and dad, but it isn't to me, having a top notch graphics card is too expensive for me, but it might not be for you.

It's all about what you want/need and the amount of money each individual has at their disposal. Having the fastest drive possible for your OS might be worth it to some, it's not up to either of us to determine :)
 
Yes, RamDisk Plus can be used as a page/swap file storage location, and yes, it does improve performance in that respect to some degree. A lot of folks will dismiss it simply as sheer idiocy, but realize that people in general are really fucking stupid anyway. I've been constructing, designing, and building - by hand - high performance machines for decades now that maximize everything a box has inside. I can take any "high end" PC from any manufacturer like Falcon Northwest, Voodoo, Alienware, and the like and typically give you a 20% boost in overall system performance in 20 mins or less because they simply don't get it.

I get it, because I've been doing it far longer, I do.

It's not just about getting more performance, it's about making the box as efficient as possible and wringing out every last drop of what the hardware can do. You wanna overclock it, go for it. Then I'll sit down and make it even faster - and by faster I mean it's more efficient. No, the 20% boost doesn't mean it's 20% faster in framerates in games, but it does mean that the performance of the system overall is ~20% faster than it was before I sat down for ~20 mins and tuned it up more so than it was before I got my hands on it.

And yes, the majority of the performance boost comes from one single piece of software: RamDisk Plus, installed and configured correctly as it should be. All temp files are re-assigned to the RAMdisk - Windows creates a shitload of them constantly, placing them on the RAMdisk boosts performance considerably. And there are several other aspects of Windows that can be "hosted" from the RAMdisk and boost performance even more so.

It's not an "ok, install this program and wham, you're flying..." type of situation because there's more to it, obviously. This isn't meant to be a "I know you don't believe me so here, I'll prove it" post or posts in this thread. Anyone that knows anything about real RAMdisks knows what I'm talking about, and the iRAM and similar devices - even though they're "solid state devices" without physical magnetic storage capability - simply cannot match what a simple piece of software and plenty of high speed system RAM can do. That's about it in a nutshell.

spazoid said:
It's all about what you want/need and the amount of money each individual has at their disposal. Having the fastest drive possible for your OS might be worth it to some, it's not up to either of us to determine
Click to expand...

Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? That last sentence there basically says "Oh, yeah, having a fast hard drive is nice for your system but you're not capable of making that decision for yourself." You're stating that a person can't do research and figure out what works and what does for themselves, at least that's my read on it.

People go out and get Photoshop, a ton of RAM, and they're still dissatisfied with how it operates even on "high end" machines - it's a piece of shit, it always has been. It is so drastically inefficient in how it's been designed over the years and they've never seemed to realize one thing they could do to absolutely maximize the performance: they could have designed Photoshop with a RAMdisk driver built in that loads when Photoshop loads, allows you to assign a portion of chip RAM to scratch disk duties, and unloads when the software is closed. This stuff is dead freakin' simple, folks. But they've never done it, and never will.

So then I come along and make Photoshop nearly ~2000% faster or more on any box it's installed on if it's got some extra RAM. How can that be a bad thing?

Or maybe someone thinks it's not for me to determine... go figure.

Caine:

That's exactly why it's a decent thing to use these days, meaning RAMdisks if you have the extra RAM. If you've got 3 RAM slots, I'm not sure if that would still keep the dual channel operation - it depends on the mobo and the chipset. If you have 4 slots then obviously 8GB is the way to go, but 6 (2x2 + 2x1) would still ensure dual channel mode is functional and keeps that speed benefit.

You can use RamDisk Plus for anything that needs to be stored on a hard drive and get the massive incredible benefits of gigabytes per second of bandwidth instead of the lower speeds possible from hard drives, even SSD hardware nowadays, and even if that stuff is in RAID 0 arrays.
 
Hmm, interesting software, but when I saw the pricing, I nearly had an aneurysm.
 
Cyrilix said:
Hmm, interesting software, but when I saw the pricing, I nearly had an aneurysm.
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ramdiskplusmr8.png


I don't get it. What's so expensive? We're primarily discussing desktop systems, not servers. If you're looking at the server versions of RamDisk Plus, then yes, the cost goes up but that's a given with most any software. Usually entails more support so, the cost is higher.
 
Hypernova said:
The only way to solve that sata issue is to use more of them I guess, virtually separate the capacity and let the MB raid them.. The 8 slot model has two but the XS thread doesn't say any thing about how they are used together.
Click to expand...

I don't know about any internal RAID setup, but because the model with 6 memory slots only has 1 SATA port and is capped at 200MB/sec, it's worth noting that the 8 memory slot model that uses 2 SATA ports is quoted at 400MB/sec. Apparently it uses both SATA ports to the max!
 
Well if you are using a 64bit OS and your MB can support lots of RAM, the best thing for your page file is to bulk up on RAM and TURN the page file OFF.
 
Time to update this thread - because I've got one of these bad boys in house all week!

Ye gods, this thing is fast. Graphs are flat and linear - just like the mitron benchmarks we were seeing. Access time is listed at 0.0 ms with *write* speeds almost as fast as the read performance. Looks just like a SATA HDD - no drivers for the drive. (Still need the RAID or SATA drivers for the mainboard, if the OS does not come with it...)

I've got the 8 DDR2 slot version right now. With a jumper you can configure the drive to hang all of the RAM off of one SATA port, or split the RAM between two SATA ports. Your call if you want to RAID-0 them or not.

Working on some benchmarks now.

The CF card backup works remarkably well. I am able to pop in a Linux based image, restore - then pop back in an xp-64 image. No software required, all hardware.

First pics in the wild...

backside.jpg


The 8 slot version should go for ~ 400USD. Forward looking statement, and all that...
 
heelix said:
Time to update this thread - because I've got one of these bad boys in house all week!

Ye gods, this thing is fast. Graphs are flat and linear - just like the mitron benchmarks we were seeing. Access time is listed at 0.0 ms with *write* speeds almost as fast as the read performance. Looks just like a SATA HDD - no drivers for the drive. (Still need the RAID or SATA drivers for the mainboard, if the OS does not come with it...)

I've got the 8 DDR2 slot version right now. With a jumper you can configure the drive to hang all of the RAM off of one SATA port, or split the RAM between two SATA ports. Your call if you want to RAID-0 them or not.

Working on some benchmarks now.

The CF card backup works remarkably well. I am able to pop in a Linux based image, restore - then pop back in an xp-64 image. No software required, all hardware.

First pics in the wild...

backside.jpg


The 8 slot version should go for ~ 400USD. Forward looking statement, and all that...
Click to expand...

So was my theory correct? Does the drive presents itself as two drives when under dual SATA mode? How would the capacity splitting work if you have odd number of GBs then?
 
I second what Joe Average says, once you've used Photoshop, SoundForge too, with them pointing to a ram disk you can never go back.
 
Hypernova said:
So was my theory correct? Does the drive presents itself as two drives when under dual SATA mode? How would the capacity splitting work if you have odd number of GBs then?
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The computer will see it as two drives, so even if they are odd, it should still work...however, you will loose space on the higher capacity side.


I can't wait for this product to come.
 
There are two modes - single SATA and dual SATA. Single SATA just adds up all the RAM you shovel in and treats it as one drive.

Dual SATA is a bit more finicky. Your RAM must be in pairs, mostly.

[8] [6] [7] [5] -- battery -- [1] [3] [2] [4]

So slot 1 & 2, then 3 & 4, and so on. It splits the total RAM in half and gives each disk some. I only had 2 GB sticks, so was not able to mix and match, but I asked their engineering about mixed RAM. They said it was fine - so you could have 2x2G and 2x512M, and the total available disk would be 2.5G per port.

However... They also did something interesting on the ECC side. If you want ECC, they will reserve part of that RAM and let you emulate ECC RAM while using the much cheaper non-ECC RAM. Interesting. I enabled it with a 4x2G partition with non-ECC RAM and it reccomended a 7G drive.

Also tried it with 2x4G sticks. Worked like a charm.

This really *is* a RAM drive. Yes, you can buy software that will partition out your system board's RAM, but for those of us who have a fully populated mainboard (and use that system RAM), this essentially adds an extra 6 to 8 slots. In my case, the motherboard only has 4 total slots.

I was pushing it for more database operations, but yes - photoshop, vmware (if you can make it fit), and any other heavy IO operations just scream. When installing an OS on the drive, I think I've set a new personal record for a bog standard Win32 setup. Amazing to watch it go from 28 minutes and finish in just over 2.
 
Note, 32GB compact flash cards are less than $100 as well.

I guess a logical order right now would be to put swap/OS on the RAM drive, programs and data on two separate platter drives. It would take up all 4 SATA ports on a typical motherboard..but damn if that performance wouldn't be sexy.
 
Trepidati0n said:
..but damn if that performance wouldn't be sexy.
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But still slow as fuck compared to a real RAMdisk... hehehe and a helluvalot more expensive too. Nice to see someone getting some use out of such a device, but... oh well, my opinions are well known around these parts. I'll shut up now. :D
 
Is it a SATA I or a SATA II disk interface? It should be able to peg the SATA II interface, in RAID0, approaching as close to the theoretical max as possible.
 
Joe Average said:
But still slow as fuck compared to a real RAMdisk... hehehe and a helluvalot more expensive too. Nice to see someone getting some use out of such a device, but... oh well, my opinions are well known around these parts. I'll shut up now. :D
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I love the fact that you, again, leave out part of the post that you're quoting to make it look like real RAM disks is the best solution.


Trepidati0n said:
I guess a logical order right now would be to put swap/OS on the RAM drive
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Did you ever come up with a solution for that? :p
 
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