I just completed a review of this device with many more tests showing the performance in 1.5gb SATA mode and 3.0 mode.
Check it out -> http://2xod.com/articles/ANS_9010_ramdisk_review/

The front of this thing will make your computer look like Kit from Night Rider. Good or bad thing? That's up to you.

Pretty cool, too bad it wasn't released a year ago.
Still cheaper in the end to just buy lots of RAM and slice off a RAMDrive in Software.

Excellent article. I've been waiting for something like this for a long time, with testing and all, nice job really. I've wanted for a product like this for years. The iRam was close, but limited & required special drivers..meaning it couldn't work with freaky os's sometimes (centOS for example).

I recently bought a SSD which uses an inexpensive MLC technology I think (maybe SLC, if I'm lucky). It's called a filemate goSolid .. interesting name thats for sure. Anyways, it's 64gb, and it hauls butt 100+/- mb/sec read and 80+/- write! Additionally, I have 2 of the Seagate Baracuda's you tested! Wow, cool! Likewise, seeing my friends' raptors in there was really helpful. I've heard of and seen the F1 drive around, thanks for including it. Also, thanks for including ALL these sweet products in the testing..some of us DO realize that buying and using better components can pay off big time & applies to storage as much as the memory you use in a system, or its processor.

About the product: This is a unique product for a certain class of customer, especially given the premium price. The other models mentioned from same mfg. might be a little more usable by the mainstream, and could really be the sweet-spot that sells millions of units.. Very cool technologies are being developed here with this unit, it could really be the shiz for use in a fileserver.. I wonder what a storage array would do with a gang of these. I wonder what a [DRAM!] cached RAID controller could do with a gang of these monsters? Any XDDR (like in my ps3?) RAID cards out there yet? What about a ddr3 solution from the same co!? Gawd man, 600MB/sec writes could possibly happen then?! FFS!

The only thing I would say you could have added to the article was a little more about compatibility, did it work in linux, if so, which types? Since you tested transactions: Will it run with informix, or a postgres/mysql/oracle db-testing suite against this might be interesting? What about webserver support: centOS, debian, wha? Can I plug this thing into my psp and play games off iso files thru a usb to sata2 connector? Just kidding man, you did a great article, thanks I appreciate it.

Someone should definately make a PCIe RAM disk and be done with it. No SATA interface crap. Make the battery optional, and kill the flash backup. Solder the RAM onto the board. Simplify and cheapen.

Its not too hard to make a script to back up files to another internal hard disk, if needed. It would take the Linux server crowd just a moment to whip up code to use such a device as a magic file caching space (no backup needed). It would be awesome to go buy 64G "file cache cards" to plug in without any configuration needed. Imagine whole databases and web applications living in there. Would be great for read-limited applications.

The age of flash drives is FAST approaching. I think this kind of thing is past it's prime release date.

I don't mind the whole failure after however-many writes thing of flash memory. They'll still last beyond their useful life, and anybody using mechanical hard drives as long-term backup solutions are kidding themselves. Sure I have an odd 20GB hard drive from 8 years ago or so, but I took everything important off of it years ago.

If I'm not mistaken, the older versions of the hyperdrive predated the original i-RAM.

That being said, I would buy (at least) one of these if the prices were $100 for the low end model, and $150 (U.S.) for the high end model, as I have been waiting for an i-RAM type drive in any form with a SATA-2 interface, AND a resonable price. Having now watched some youtube videos on these DRAM hard drives booting and using various OS's, I want one even more.

Unfortunately, the pricing is too high for the timing of the re-release of this product.

EDIT: It would be interesting to see TR review the ACARD ANS-9012 2.5 inch SATA-to-SDHC Flash Disk. I can think of a few uses for that relativly cheap product with some cheap fast SD cards in it....

say hyperdrive 5

this is old news

it been around chine product made for

hyperdrive 5 (say hyperdrive 4)

re-released under new name:

Use for an I-RAM or other ram based SSD: Windows 7 on an eMachines eTower 633i

I'm using it as my only swap volume at the moment, initially dedicated it to Readyboost but this seems to work better. No Aero Glass as the last i810 graphics drivers ever tossed out were for XP, but other than that, it works damn well.

It's feels faster on the desktop/browsing/etc than it did with Fedora 10 or Debian "Lenny" on it. I did have to find a tweaked bios originally destined for an HP to install though, as the ACPI implementation is woefully antique.

So far I've got an SATA controller shoved in, Gigabyte I-RAM with 4GB for swap, 512MB SDRAM (max it'll take), and a P3 1ghz running at 750mhz thanks to the lack of 133mhz FSB support. If I had a third usable PCI slot I'd find another I-RAM to shove in so one could swap and one could handle ReadyBoost... got a 500GB IDE drive to throw at it, and I may try to track down a 1.4ghz Tualatin Celeron and at that point it'll be 'maxxed out'.

So, if anyone wants to suggest benches to test the impact of RAM drives on slow boxes, or ReadyBoost, I've got the setup for it now. : )

There is an external power supply available. And I believe the cost is due to the use of an FPGA rather than custom silicon. (That's likely a good chunk of the bottleneck as well.)

For all the people clamoring for a PCIe version, that requires drivers to do any good. Going SATA means this can drop into a whole ton of systems as is. It's a great way to speed up otherwise hammered systems that can't take any more ram or are otherwise disk bound without having to re-invent the wheel.

For the money I would take the X25-E. It's more than fast enough, smaller, and cooler.

Where this could be useful, if money were no object, is for a dedicated swap-file drive. 8GB RAM would be plenty and cheap enough, and there are no wear-out issues to deal with.

What are the odds of getting another set of benches done with the prior generation of this drive?

http://www.hyperdrive4.com/index.php

DDR1 based, and it would do automatic dump/restore to an onboard ATA device when it detected power loss, and you could use it while it was restoring. So with a battery pack and 2.5" ATA drive attached, it acted just like traditional magnetic media, pull the plug, walk away for a week, come back and it's still there. I'm hoping the ACARD unit that HyperOS is now selling as the HyperDrive5 will have it's firmware updated to duplicate that functionality.

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This was looking very good until we got to the bit with the price. Seems very expensive for one controller chip, eight RAM slots, a CF interface, SATA & power connectors, a battery, a PCB, and a box. I suppose that's a reflection of the development costs, but if this ever became popular and achieved real mass production, then I don't see any reason why it should cost more than a mid-range motherboard. At that kind of price it would become very attractive, but as it stands it would be an odd choice to take this over a flash SSD for less money.

It would also be an improvement if it could use standby power to allow the disk to remember its contents with the system shut down, with then just a smaller battery supplied for emergencies (does the write-to-CF function work on battery power?).

Great review.
I really like these a little more exotic hardware solutions.
This kind of technology has great promise.

Unfortunately the this product fail miserably in several aspects.

1. 400MB/s throuhgput, come on, use a 4x pci-express and get some decent number instead.

2. 4 hours battery life, ridiculous, add an external power adapter, you can get one from China for 1 dollar

3. price, 380$. I can see myself by this for 150$ but 380 and they price themselves out of the market. I'd much rather buy 2 32 GB SSDs and put them in RAID0. That makes much more sense than this. SSD prices will go down very quickly this and the coming years. I guess this card cannot cost much more than 30$-40$ to produce, this premium price will only hurt themselves in the long run.

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I can live with 16Gb(8x2Gb) of boot drive if I get an extreme performance boost compared to SSDs. In the coming months there will be 500Mb/s+ SSDs that we can RAID. We need something like 2GB/s+ for this card to be interesting.

Interesting concept and a good try but go back and make a new product with some small changes and I will buy it.

I was really hoping that this device would be at least twice as good as Gigabyte I-Ram. I guess I should not expect miracles.

Outside of 3 improvements, its just an I-Ram.

1. higher capacity
2. CF backup

dual sata - raid possibility, an interesting toy, but it really depends on the performance of on-board raid controller. As someone mentioned, it would be nice to see a test with a professional raid card, maybe the on-board raid is not simply efficient enough to bring out the true performance of the device.

with regards to comments about PCI-e device. that would be a mistake. what this device, and Gigabyte I-Ram drive bring is totally pass through device, what i mean, is no DRIVERS. a pure SATA drive from the systems perspective. having a PCI-e device would require drivers, etc etc... there are plenty of devices like that. true expensive, and a cheaper solution would probably be welcomed.

Just to correct those of you who are thinking that the Gigabyte i-ram PCI device used PCI to transfer. The Gigabyte I-Ram used it only to take power, and standby power when the system is off (but pluged into the wall). As there is enough power going down the PCI lanes to keep the ram active. I would like to know how this device keeps its ram powered when the system is shutdown? if it is just from standard SATA power cable.. does SATA cable keep energy flowing when system is shut down? Or is it just with the battery pack?

One thing they could have implemented is on-board RAID0. Granted that would saturate the SATA cable, but then it would not have to rely on south bridge to perform such functions (as it could be holding down the performance).

There is plenty of possibility in this device.
Maybe in Version II (if there is one) they will sort it all out, but i guess till then, my Gigabyte I-ram will just have to do.
Maybe Gigabyte will release their II-RAM, or whatever ther DDR2 prototype was called.

I was always interested in Ram drive. Those intel x25 are pretty fast. I would have never thought it would be fast as a ddr2 ram drive.

I would have liked if Geoff included ram drive directly from our motherboard and see how well this contraption compares.

Grammar error, page 5: "The RAM disks back claw back to the front...", emphasis mine.

Really good article. I wonder if this drive would be good to compile on. I can also see this in an insanely high-end gaming system, where you install a couple of new games on it just to get really fast level load times.

Serial ATA is not 300 MB/s but 3.0Gb/s

3000 Mb/s megabits/second is 375MB/s megabytes/second (3000/8=375)

note lower case b goes for bits as gigabits Gb, upper case B goes for bytes like megabytes MB

Serial buses like serial ata are always measured in bits 1,5Gb/s 3,0Gb/s

Paralel interfaces like ATA are measured in bytes 133MB/s 100MB/s ...

Please correct the article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata#SATA_1.5_Gbit.2Fs_and_SATA_3_Gbit...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR2_SDRAM#Specification_standards

shouldn't that be meiosis - mitosis would be RAID 1 (identical copies)?

This drive is a bad and old idea. I like it better when it was called "RAMdisk". It is made in a time where HDDs for practical purposes and intend have reached a performance plateau.

DDR2 DRAM should be several magnitudes faster. I suspect the problem to be a combination of OS not knowing how to properly utilize it, poor implementation, and the interface itself is bottleneck.

Using a volatile storage media for "permanent" data storage is just asking for trouble, no matter what power backup solution you have. RAID 0 version is like playing around with Nitroglycerin.

Ok, stupid question but I'm going to ask it anyway. I see from the picture that they were using 5-5-5 DDR2 ram. Would having faster 4-4-4 DDR2 ram help in any way or would the bottleneck still be I/O of the bus?

my first thought was "i'll take 2 and run 4-way raid0 off my hardware raid controller"

.. but then i saw the price :( it's too high for the numbers it puts out

I don't want to hear complaints about "expensive raid controllers" people.. anyone with a half decent storage setup these days probably already has a few pci-e raid cards lying around at this point, and if you dont, you can buy a perc 5/i off ebay for ~USD$120

Besides, what we really want to know is the true performance of the device being tested - why bottleneck it with a crappy raid controller?? maybe we should run it in SATA1 mode too?

Some of those benches sure do show that storage IO isn't the bottleneck all that often.

SATA 3 standard needs to come out desperately.

Just out of curiosity: why were these tests run on a Pentium 4 platform with an ICH7R?

Why not the modern hardware used in other articles/reviews? Seems like the results would be a bit affected.

Is it to keep the hardware constant from the older SSD reviews/results?

Cool toy but it would cost a fortune to make it usable on top of the already hefty price for the drive itself. I can't even find a 8 gig dimm on newegg the biggest they have is 4 and they are about 100 bucks. A 32 gig CF card for backups is another 75 bucks. By time you add up the drive, memory and a cf card for backups your out 1200 bucks.

Its a nifty toy but its not 1200 bucks nifty.

As usual it's the price that will keep me away. I mean $400 for this thing, not including RAM? if it was priced at $99 or even $199 I might think about it. I could get 4 OCZ SSD drives for less price and have 200+ GB of flash storage, plus crazy speed if I run them in a stripe.

Nifty toy, but too expensive and pretty useless (for me)

The best solution as RAM modules become larger is to allow BIOS partitioning of RAM for system and HDD use. No additional hardware, no restrictive SATA needed and could support powered retention and booting.

In 2-3 years is Windows 7 really going to be able to use 6*8GB of RAM in 3 channel mode?