ACard's ANS-9010 Serial ATA RAM disk
 

I have to admire ACard for coming up with the ANS-9010 RAM disk. Not only does it make the solid-state storage market a little more interesting, but it occasionally offers truly inspiring performance, as well. The drive easily handled our disk-intensive iPEAK multitasking and multi-user IOMeter loads, besting the fastest SSD on the market not only when running in RAID mode, but more often than not, in a single-drive config, too. However, the ANS-9010's dominance wasn't universal. Sure, it was the quickest drive of the lot in WorldBench, but not by a significant margin. And although it exhibited the fastest write and copy speeds in FC-Test, Intel's SSDs proved quicker when it came time to reads.<br>
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The battle between the ANS-9010 and Intel's X25-E Extreme SSD was certainly an intriguing one to watch, in particular because the Extreme's storage controller seems to be the best in the business. A relatively poor performance in HD Tach's sustained and burst transfer rate tests suggests this latest RAM disk still has room to improve on that front. Sure, it handily beat the i-RAM across the board, but Gigabyte's take on the inexpensive RAM disk concept is several years old.<br>
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So how much does all of this cost? $380 for the ANS-9010, plus the cost of memory. The 16GB of DDR2-800 DIMMs we used today will set you back roughly $176, bringing the drive's total cost up to about $555. A 32GB configuration made up of 4GB modules, which run around $100 each, will set you back just under $1200 when all is said and done. This latest RAM disk isn't cheap, then. But neither are SSDs that offer equivalent performance. Intel's 32GB X25-E Extreme runs around $600, for example.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255