RAM Disk Puts New Spin On the SSD 305
theraindog writes "Although the solid-state storage market is currently dominated by flash-based devices, you can also build an SSD out of standard system memory modules. Hardware-based RAM disks tend to be prohibitively expensive, but ACard has built an affordable one that supports up to 64GB of standard DDR2 memory and features dual Serial ATA ports to improve performance with RAID configurations. And it's driver-free and OS-independent, too. The Tech Report's in-depth review of the ANS-9010 RAM disk pits it against the fastest SSDs around and nicely illustrates the drive's staggering performance potential with multitasking and multi-user loads. However, it also highlights the device's shortcomings, including the fact that SSDs are more practical for most applications."
Why are these always so expensive? (Score:3, Interesting)
Without RAM, this costs $380 which is probably more than double the RAM itself if you don't use anything to extravagant. I know other companies offered these in the past, with the similiar high price, always to act as a harddrive with a battery for backup. It was always easy in linux to make a portion of your memory act as a ramdisk, however many motherboards often didnt enough ram slots to make it appealing to split memory up like that.
I wonder if a company like Apple can instead, on its laptops for instance, just move to SSD for its laptops since they are becoming seemingly cheap, exclusively (for OEMs) license a technology like MFT, and get a real speed edge on other makers. I think it would make more sense than a ramdisk where the bandwidth of ram vs the hard drive channel seems overkill.
No ECC... (Score:4, Interesting)
so, this is just as worthless as Gigabyte's i-RAM.
I RTFA and now speculate (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing new (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a high-load mail server that uses a 2G RAM disk (a Curtis Nitro!Xe [curtisssd.com]) for the queue. It looks like a normal 3.5"/1" high SCSI drive with a SCA hot-swap connector. It was made before high-density CF cards, so it has a 2.5" notebook hard drive inside for storage after shutdown (it has a battery to start the drive, dump the RAM, and shut down). We've had this in service for almost 5 years, and it has really made a difference.
The point to a RAM disk is not necessarily bulk data throughput, but I/O operations per second. Mechanical drives are limited to 100-200 random IOPS or less, while the RAM disk can easily hit 100,000.
Good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
My university used RAM disks back in the day - it was the only way to get decent performance on older machines. The computers didn't even have hard disks in. My brother (who went to the same university) has a story where he sped up his large FORTRAN compiles by a factor of 10 just by working out how to use the RAMDisk (which was only ever used by the PXE-style boot procedure and then hidden from the OS) for his own purposes and people couldn't work out how he was doing it because he still took stuff home and brought it in on floppy. This is a nice hark back to those times.
The killer, however, is the price... the price of a PC, basically, before you add the RAM. If you're REALLY serious, you'll have machines that can just take the extra RAM directly and do this in software. If you're not willing to pay that much, well, nothing will work for you but a few bits of extra RAM and a fast SSD for the same price won't go amiss. However, if you occupy the middle ground... this still doesn't seem worth the effort. It'd be cheaper to just buy an SSD, some extra RAM for cache and maybe even a cheap PC to throw it all in (if NanoITX supported 8Gig chips, this device could almost be made obsolete overnight).
The interconnect too - yes, it emulates a SATA drive but it emulates two as well and fails to do anything significant with them. So you'd need a RAID0 setup, with independent SATA setup, and an expensive device, with lots of even more expensive RAM just to be a fraction of a second quicker than an off-the-shelf SSD in the same machine. The people for whom it's worth it won't want to be bothered with all this.
The CF Backup feature is fantastic. I love the idea. But 20 minutes is a long time to wait if the battery is only four hours worth when it's brand new (four hours? At least 24 would have been useful and given you a chance to actually do something with it). You would want to be backing up anything this thing held anyway, so you don't really gain anything because the CF is the most inconvenient backup because of its manual nature.
I can't see a situation where 64Gb of fast storage is worth that amount of money + time + hassle + 64Gb of RAM + potential firmware problems + interface cabling + ... The bottlenecks in anything serious are going to be elsewhere.
Much as I like this, I can't see the market (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, I absolutely love these devices. It's a great idea that's been well executed, and yes, they're a niche product, but we've one or two apps that would notice the increase in speed from these, and if I had the money I'd buy a whole bunch of them to stick in our servers. ... except that you don't get 5.25" bays in an awful lot of modern rack mounted servers. Certainly none of our new kit has them; all that space is taken up with hot swap 3.5" or 2.5" drives.
And that's what kills it for me. Even if I'm looking at a new server I'd have to make sacrifices to fit one of these. My first choice for a new storage server is going to be one with 24x 2.5" drive bays. I'd have to sacrifice a full 8 drive bays to make room for one of these, and it's just not worth it. Not when I can buy an Intel SSD for the same price, loose just one bay, and have it hot swap to boot.
And even worse, there are PCIe devices just around the corner, with 3-4x the read and write speed of any SATA device. Those will drop straight into any of our current servers, no problem at all.
So unfortunately, much as I love the ANS-9010, I just can't see any reason to buy one :(
For some tasks its very useful (Score:2, Interesting)
I totally agree. For some tasks its very useful. (If we had memory that was the speed and no write deterioration like it was DRAM, but non-volatile like Flash, then that kind of memory would make this DDR2 based product obsolete, but until that time, its very interesting. Maybe there's hope in time for Memristor based memory, but for now this product does have some advantages).
I was interested in Gigabyte i-RAM but its too limited at only 4Gb.
I have wondered how practical it would be to create an open hardware project like this product, based around FPGA and DDR2 (or maybe DDR3 as that will likely be cheaper within the next I guess about 18 months and taking over from DDR2). Does anyone know of any existing open projects like this?
Re:Great for swap and /tmp (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole thing is pointless - why not just put 64GBs of ram in your PC and let it fill it up with disk cache. This makes no sense. If you compare this thing to just putting the RAM in your PC there are NO upsides. The data is vulnerable, it's massively expensive and an inefficient use of the RAM modules. Madness.
Well, from everything on this product that slashdot has mentioned, just sticking RAM on a motherboard would be a better solution. It's not always the best though.
I've wanted one of these things for awhile:
http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Storage-Devices/CENATEK-Rocket-Drive-SSD/ [devhardware.com]
But could never justify the cost to myself. Were real RAM drives comes into their stride is any app that is HD I/O bound gets hugely speed up. You've also got to consider that this stuff is scaled down industrial stuff. I'd glance at the real 64 GB RAM disk and the all cost around 40-50K. They weren't for joe slashdot home user unless you had a few tens of K you wanted to spend. Now the real stuff had a builtin HD that the RAM was mirrored and it wasn't that difficult for them to convince business users to use a good UPS on the thing. You wouldn't believe the differences sticking any DB app on one of these things makes. Trust me you know when you really need one of these.
Now where Cenatek came along they tried to cut the cost for a PCI plugin board to $500-600 and then charged you a bit for the different amounts of RAM you'd put in their device. Sure it had to be externally powered or go dead. That's a draw back. But it did do "cheaply" what the real RAM drives did for the big boys. So if you really could afford it, you could stick your OS and favorite apps on there and notice a very responsive increase. They really started selling that thing somewhere between Win2000-WinXP when anything over 1 GB was rarely seen in a desktop. (It was easier adding a PCI card with 4 GB RAM than changing mother boards.)
Now a days with 3-4 GBs in "budget" desktops, I'd want a 64 or 128 GB RAM drive, but I'm also kinda like you, if I had the money I'd most likely see more immediate bang for the buck just adding system RAM. You do see really big increases though in real RAM drives. Then again how many mother boards do you see that'll let you plug in 64 GB of RAM? Actually, I think that some of this is just a stop gap especially at any individually affordable price. Just wait until you see 128 GB RAM in the $200 walmart special desktop.
Re:What I learned from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
What if the ramdisk function was moved into the motherboard chipset? This would achieve 2 things:
1. It would dramatically cut the cost of a ramdisk. I.e. The cost of the entire motherboard might go up by $5 or so.
2. It would eliminate that SATA bottleneck, allowing ramdisk to run at full RAM speed.
If you then figure out a way to have this data loaded to the ramdisk from a hard drive at poweron (or get realy clever and mount a flash chip on or near each DIMM which takes a backup of that DIMM, just before powerdown.
Re:Performance issues... (Score:3, Interesting)
Mac OS7 had a way of creating a RAM disk from installed RAM. Was sweet way to run Photoshop at top speed back then, along with the dedicated Photoshop video card. Such specialization back then.
Re:Performance issues... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What I learned from the article (Score:4, Interesting)
The real question that is not being answered here is why does a 32 GB SD card cost $25 but a 64 GB SATA hard drive cost $800?
A 32GB SDHC card right now on Newegg (in-stock) is a minimum of $72. I don't know where you got the $25 number (sure, in another year it will be that cheap). As another poster mentioned, Newegg has 32GB SSDs available for the same price range.
Why can't the technology that makes SD cards so cheap make cheap SATA hard drives as well?
It already has. The first SSDs on the market used single-level cell (SLC) flash [wikipedia.org], while the inexpensive SD cards and mp3 players you see everywhere use multi-level cell (MLC) flash [wikipedia.org]. The difference is how densely you can pack the data, and it makes a huge difference in price.
To put it simply: SLC flash is faster, lower-power, and more reliable than MLC flash, but also more expensive (at same capacity) than MLC flash.
The reason the first SSDs used SLC flash is because new technologies have to convince people to take the plunge: people/companies are usually willing to pay significantly more for something that is much faster and more reliable. Early adpoters might have given SSDs the cold shoulder if the first wave of drives reduced capacity and performance in-order to be more cost-competitive with existing storage.
Now that SSDs are firmly off-the-ground, manufacturers are offering all sorts of devices, including cut-rate drives using MLC flash, so the prices at the low-end have dropped like a rock.
Re:What I learned from the article (Score:3, Interesting)
Bingo.
That's why I'm holding out for a FusionIO. Their cards go through PCIe4x - not SATA. I want 600MB/sec reads/writes! 60k ops/sec, and cheaper than this thing!
I just hope their consumer grade products perform as well as their enterprise ones. Apparently tech report will be reviewing them as soon as they can get their hands on them.
Re:What I learned from the article (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not what I want. I don't want to have to buy the fastest, most expensive RAM available just to use as a RAM disk. I'd prefer cheaper RAM, maybe two or three generations old, that I can get in massive quantities.
Except that you can't get two or three gen old RAM in massive quantities. At least, not for as cheap as the new stuff. See for yourself: 1 GB of PC 133 RAM is more expensive than 1 GB of DDR or DDR2 RAM [pricewatch.com]. There's a very short window of "cheaper" just behind the bleeding edge that's cheaper than the very latest (DDR3) but new motherboards support this type of RAM too, negating the "two or three gen old" situation that you state.
Most people think that the older the technology, the cheaper it gets. But this is only true for a very small time window, at which point the older technology gets phased out (not profitable, anymore) at which point it becomes a "niche" marketplace with very low volume and very high prices.
Example: A PC-133 RAM stick needed to keep a $12,000 vertical-market weaving loom operational, where the cost of the additional RAM pales compared to the cost of the entire integrated system. If you need that extra 512k of RAM in your $12,000 loom, paying $100 for it isn't such a bad deal.
But there aren't many people stuck with $12,000 looms, so the price of the older technology skyrockets until it's simply not available anymore. (Ever try buying a *NEW* Cx 6x86 processor in the last year or so?)