HDD Upgrade Time: Acard ANS-9010 vs Gigabyte I-RAM vs SSD

Storage/SSD by massman @ 2009-04-13

As an alternative to the slow platter-based hard drives there already a few ram disk-based solutions on the market. Acard recently designed their ram disk product, which allows users to use DDR2 memory as storage method. Today, we have a look at the performance of the Acard ANS-9010 and compare it with normal hard disk drives, SSD technology and other ram disks.

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Introduction

Madshrimps (c)


Introduction:

A few weeks ago, the laptop on which I'm writing this article crashed due to my own clumsiness. The notebook slipped out of my hands and hit the ground, even bouncing off a few times; this resulted in a hard disk drive failure. Since I had to replace my hard disk drive, I went out looking for a bigger and better product: at least 7200rpm and if possible SSD. The prices of the SSD's are still a bit too high, so I went for a 7200rpm Western Digital disk drive, which would be only a tad faster than my old, broken 5400rpm. Turns out, my Windows Vista installation runs a lot more fluent and the number of hick-ups has decrease dramatically.

This was actually the first time I experienced the incredible bottleneck of the harddisk drive. Of course, I know the impact of iRam and other ramdisk based storage drives in benchmarks such as PCMark05, but ... those are just benchmarks and don't always reflect the real-life performance of hardware. Switching to 7200rpm harddisks, together with our latest HDD versus SSD article, made me wonder how dramatically the switch to a ramdisk based storage medium would be. Luckily, Acard was kind enough to send me a new DDR2-ramdisk based module, the ANS-9010, to test this out.

Madshrimps (c)


In this article, we'll let normal platter hard disk drives compete against new-tech SSD's and of course ram disk based configurations. Thanks to Johan, a member of the Madshrimps overclocking team, we were able to put the Gigabyte iRam to test as well.

Additionally we'll have a look at the performance of a Raid 0 configuration compared to single drive configurations.
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Comment from Bosw8er @ 2009/04/15
Been a while since i read an entire article.
hattip to you!

Don't know if it's still possible, but including a small vid might be more .. euh ... illustrative (opposed to graphs)

ref:
Comment from jmke @ 2009/04/15
Comment from Bosw8er @ 2009/04/15
Quote:
Originally Posted by jmke View Post
top!
missed that because of hollidays
Comment from jmke @ 2009/04/15
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bosw8er View Post
top!
missed that because of hollidays
shame on you!
Comment from Diegis0n @ 2009/04/20
Grreat review! I just love what the Acard can do

Vertex vs hdd is amazing we've all known for long that hdd is a serious bottleneck and this illustration is just makes me want to order 1
Comment from leeghoofd @ 2009/04/21
I can lend you my Vertex mate if you wish ( 60Gb ) will arrive this week
Comment from Diegis0n @ 2009/04/21
talking to me?
Comment from leeghoofd @ 2009/04/21
ze one and only

Ik heb weinig tijd nu om te benchen : I7 roundup afwerken, volgende week heel de week weg met het werk, dan Lanparty met Blindje, dus ik kan ze wel even missen.
Comment from Diegis0n @ 2009/04/21
Ik zou ze pas na mijn examens kunnen "benutten" wat 05/05 wordt dus juist na de lan als je er dan nog geen tijd voor hebt, i'd love to
Comment from jmke @ 2009/05/09
Windows 7 on the ACARD


only downside... can only have 1 game/app installed at a time; this is Win7 and Crysis 1.2 installed; no hibernation file, page file 200mb. Disk is made up of 8x2Gb sticks (€160)



you read that right
1.78Mb free

 

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