ACARD ANS-9010B SATA Ramdisk

About a year ago, I tried to use the Gigabyte GC-RAMDISK/iRAM SATA RAMDISK and ran into horrible problems. I was looking for a non-volatile storage device that I could use for ZFS logs, so fsync() and friends could complete in a millisecond or two, but it was pretty clear that the iRAM just wasn’t going to work for me. Unfortunately, there really weren’t any alternatives on the market at the time; a few manufacturers made PCI NVRAM cards, but they were all OEM-only and I couldn’t find anyone to sell me one. What I really wanted was a device with around 4 GB of RAM, a CF slot, a SATA port, and a battery. It’d act like a RAM-backed SATA device, with fast I/O speeds, but when the power died it’d use the battery to copy everything from RAM onto the compact flash card. Then at bootup it’d copy it all back.

Amazingly enough, ACARD managed to sneak two of these onto their website in July. The ANS-9010B lists for $249 and has 6 DDR2 slots and 1 SATA port, while the ANS-9010 lists for $399 and has 8 DDR2 slots and 2 SATA ports. Neither one is widely available yet, but it sounds like they’re starting to trickle into the US.

I’d like to see a few benchmarks when they’re actually available. In theory a RAM-based NVRAM device should have substantially higher write speeds than a flash SSD, but it’s been screwed up before, and flash SSDs are widely available and constantly dropping in price.

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:48:00 GMT

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Comments

  1. Billigflug Kuba 1 day later:

    “What I really wanted was a device with around 4 GB of RAM, a CF slot, a SATA port, and a battery. It’d act like a RAM-backed SATA device, with fast I/O speeds, but when the power died it’d use the battery to copy everything from RAM onto the compact flash card. Then at bootup it’d copy it all back.”

    Hey scott did it realy works? I have a lot of problems with my Gigabyte Gc-… too! If you have current informations about this problems tell me the answers :-) Greet, Flug

  2. Vincent Janelle 1 day later:

    If you look around at the SSD benchmarks that have been floating around, they all suck for write performance because the flash devices need to wipe 128KB chunks at a time to write 4KB of data.

  3. Scott Laird 1 day later:

    Vincent, from what I’ve seen that’s true of every SSD on the market except for Intel’s new X25-[ME] devices. Supposedly they deliver full speed no matter what you throw at them. All of the others have entertaining performance for mixed read/write workloads once the device is full.

  4. Jason 16 days later:

    I found them on eBay and a distributor site for ACARD: 2san.com

    just search for ACARD ram disk on eBay :)

  5. Jason 16 days later:

    I found them on eBay and a distributor site for ACARD: 2san.com

    just search for ACARD ram disk on eBay :)

  6. Jason 16 days later:

    I found them on eBay and a distributor site for ACARD: 2san.com

    just search for ACARD ram disk on eBay :)

  7. Tom 4 months later:

    And here you go:

    http://www.acard.com.tw/english/newstabpop.jsp?idno=87

    Need some deep pockets to run a meaningfully large partition in RAID 0, though. The company does a performance comparison to some recent solid state drives as well. Good of them, as the product doesn’t really stack up all that well on price-performance. But boy, does it clobber a WD Velociraptor.

  8. Tom 4 months later:

    And here you go:

    http://www.acard.com.tw/english/newstabpop.jsp?idno=87

    Need some deep pockets to run a meaningfully large partition in RAID 0, though. The company does a performance comparison to some recent solid state drives as well. Good of them, as the product doesn’t really stack up all that well on price-performance. But boy, does it clobber a WD Velociraptor.

  9. Scott 6 months later:

    guys, I found ANS9010 on www.ezcopysmart.com very good price and service