goddess

Question as of 25-September-2009:
What are the reasons not to buy the ANS-9010 RAMdisk?


Background:

I am considering buying the:

ACARD ANS9010 5.25 inch
SATA x 2-to-DDRII RAM Disk
Up to 64GB
(RAM module and CF card not included)


Mwave:
$359.98 USD
-10.00 Coupon
--------------------
$349.98 USD


also

Acard's site


And buying 12 Gb of DDR2 RAM 667MHz for the ANS-9010.
3 RAM kits, with eat kit being
4Gb Ram (2 DIMMs, 2Gb each)


Running the ANS-9010 RAMdisk in RAID 0 (striped disks)


Why?
Looking for a speed increase.


Operating System:
WinXP Pro with some 20 applications is about
7 Giga Bytes of hard drive space.
CPU Intel 9550 Quad


As of September 2009 the local computer store was
selling the Western Digital VelociRaptor for $200 Canadian.


Thus,
$200 Western Digital VelociRaptor
$200 Western Digital VelociRaptor
----------------------------------------
$400 RAID 0 (striped disks)


So for less than $400 Canadian I can get the
ANS-9010 with no RAM.
After getting RAM put in unit in RAID 0 (striped disks)
(two SATA cables going to Motherboard)





Suggestions?
Where to get 12 Gb RAM from?



Other ways to get a large speed increase?



For this situation...
What are the reasons not to buy the
ANS-9010 RAMdisk?



To Your Best


--

jmke

12gb is not a whole lot to work with; while your XP install can be smaller than 10gb, if you want a game or app to load from that ACARD, you'll have to be lucky.
24 or 32Gb would be a minimum in my humble opinion, but then the price of the DDR2 will be quite steep as you need to work with denser memory sticks

Intel X25-M G2 SSDs in RAID 0 will be cheaper, provide more storage space, and will match performance of the ACARD in 99% of the all cases

__________________

Kougar

Agreed.

Diegis0n

Will 2 Intel SSD already match the performance that closely?

jmke

random I/O is what it is all about, a single Intel SSD already excels in that area, put two in RAID 0 and you'll have a very zippy machine

__________________

Diegis0n

Noted

goddess

> jmke typed:
> 12gb is not a whole lot to work with;
> while your XP install can be smaller than 10gb,
> if you want a game or app to load from that ACARD,
> you'll have to be lucky.
> 24 or 32Gb would be a minimum in my humble opinion,


Hello Jmke, and
top of the day to you!
Thank you for responding.


I value what you have to share about this.



Some background:
7 Gb = Operating System (Win XP Pro SP3) with some 20 applications.
That's all that's needed.
(Less than 8 Giga Bytes including pagefile.sys)

Have been using less than 8 Giga bytes for years.
So from that perspective the rest of the partition is not in use.


Thus 12 Gb of RAM for the ANS-9010 RAMdisk
was chosen as a buffer, to round-up.


And of the 7 Gbytes:
3.2 Gb for Win XP Pro SP3
from with Microsoft CDROM with all the updates.


But in the last week that
3.2 Gb for the Operating System can now be reduced to
0.5 Gb because of nLite custom WinXP Pro install.

That's correct, under
0.5 Gb (under 500 Mega bytes) of drive space for Windows XP Pro.

(nLite is a GUI for permanent Windows component removal by your choice)
So it will be interesting to see how stable this Lite XP is.



This forum says I can't post Links, URLs.
So search internet
www ocforums com
see a video of how you might make your own Lite WinXP CDROM
download
nLite 1.4 Final.rar
42,347,086 bytes



What this means is
8 Giga Bytes of Hard Drive space was just
enough room for years of use and
now that can be trimmed to under
6 Giga Bytes for
Win XP Pro and some 20 applications, No data.


---


> but then the price of the DDR2 will be quite steep
> as you need to work with denser memory sticks


After some research...
$49.99 Canadian for 4Gb (2 x 2Gb) at NewEgg.ca
Kingston 4GB (2 x 2GB)
KVR667D2K2/4GR



about:
$150.00 Canadian for 12Gb RAM or
$181.85 Canadian with taxes and shipping means
$ 15.15 per Gb with taxes and shipping, September 2009


---


about:
$400.00 Canadian for ANS-9010 RAMdisk
$181.85 Canadian for 12Gb RAM
-----------------------------------------------------
$581.85 Canadian total
ANS-9010 has 2 SATA ports for RAID 0 (striped disks)



---


> Intel X25-M G2 SSDs in RAID 0 will be cheaper,
> provide more storage space, and
> will match performance of the ACARD in 99% of the all cases


If I understand the above,
this is what I get...

at Newegg.ca
Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G2R5 2.5"
80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail

$316.00 Intel X25-M
$316.00 Intel X25-M
--------------------------------------------------------------
$726.55 RAID 0 Intel X25-M with taxes and shipping


---


$726.55 RAID 0 Intel X25-M with taxes and shipping
$581.85 RAID 0 ANS-9010 with taxes and shipping
---------------------------------------------------------------
$144.70 Difference


From that point of view the
ANS-9010 RAMdisk cost is $144.70 less.


---


With RAID 0 Intel X25-M:
160 GB avaiable for Win XP and applications and
008 GB being used as described above.
Thus some 95% of drive not being used.


---


I value what you have to share about this.
I am wondering if there is anything I don't know
that would change my mind.


Just to be super clear...
For my situation...


Original question was:
What are the reasons not to buy the ANS-9010 RAM disk?


New question:
Is there any other consideration besides cost?



Cheers!


--

jmke

Howdy


So you have NO DATA, AT ALL? No documents, no page file, no storage needed at all?
Because storing your data on that RAID-0 X25 storage will mean: rapid loading times.

While with ACARD you will have to offload your data to another storage; HDD is slow; so loading data in your application will remain at the same speed.

disk size. Anything under 32gb is unusable on daily basis if your aim is speed;
12gb - 8gb OS/app leaves 2-3gb for swapfile; and than you have 1 gb for "docs". and it won't take long for that to fill up.

the only reason to buy ACARD is to break speed records in random I/O; but for daily usage, really not cost effective to consider in my humble opinion

__________________

goddess

No Data means No Data on that Partition,
(the partition with O/S and apps)


The swap file has been accounted for in the 8 GB.
900 Mb for swap file and tests show less than
10% in used, less that 90 Mbytes being used,
Typically 11 Mbytes in use by swap file.


That's a good point, the data is on a slow drive.
(platter hard drive, 7200 RPM)


Yet much of the wait time is the
1. O/S (Win Xp)
2. Applications


--

Diegis0n

Hey there ... goddess

I guess it depends on what you do with the 20 applications.

For example: in general, if you download a movie straight to your Data Drive and not on your OS Drive, it will be a HDD, and thus slow. That movie needs an extraction in most cases and that's where the beauty is of an XXXGb SSD setup. Compare the working time of winrar on an SSD and a HDD ...

That for me is the major argument. All my big data is "processed" by my vertex

I'd love to get an Acard, but it'd be strictly for benching ...