Something new today, a DDR2 ramdrive from ACARD put through it’s benchmarking paces by our very own scooter.jay.

You’re unlikely to have heard of ACARD before so before we start, let’s get a little intro and see what they’re about.

With a solid foundation in storage solutions and interfaces, a RAM Disk is right up their alley. Let’s see what it was capable of. Over to scooter!

Introduction:

For along time Gigabytes i-RAM has been the drive of choice for PCMark benchmarkers due to it’s extremely low seek times and it’s ease of use in a RAID-0 configuration to achieve the fastest hard drive benchmarks. Today we look at the ACARD ANS-9010 which is a DDR2 RAM Disk that threatens to dethrone the kind of PCMark and become the new drive of choice. Unlike the i-RAM, the ACARD has two banks of four DIMM slots that can be populated with up to 64GB of DDR2 RAM. The RAM Disk provides two SATA2 connections and therefore has the ability to be used in various RAID configurations which promises to be good. Let’s have a look at the details.

Details:

Features:

• Supports up to 64GB amount of memory
• Supports ECC/Non-ECC DDR2 400/533/667/800**
• Automatic data backup/restore between DDR2 memory and CF card
• Built-in Lithium Battery
• LED indicators for battery capacity, power status, SATA ports activity, backup status
• Driver less: need no driver on host side

**Note: Please refer to Compatibility List for DDR2 RAM Module

Specifications:

• Two SATA 3.0Gbps Interface ports
• 240-pin DDR2 DIMM module slots x 8
• One CF socket in front panel
• Lithium Battery of 7.4V 2400mAh, enough to finish the backup
• Data transfer rate up to 400MB/sec
• IOPS 130,000 per SATA port
• Dimension: 42(H) x 145(W) x 214 (D) mm

Contents:

• ANS-9010 x1
• User Install Guide x1
• Internal SATA Cable 50cm x2
• 15pin SATA Power Cable x1
• Screw x4
• Lithium Battery x1

**Product does not include DDR2 RAM Module

On first impressions, this is a very well put together piece of kit and has a high quality feel to it. That being said, the main purpose of this piece of kit is to be fast, so we’ll get onto that right after some product photos. Sadly I am lacking a quality digital camera, so unfortunately these are the best I can do.
 

Test system:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 45nm, 2.83Ghz, 12Mb L2 Cache
• Dfi P45-T2RS Plus, Intel P45 Chipset, ICH10R Southbridge
• 2×1GB Transcend aXeRAM PC2-9600 5-5-5-15
• 620W Enermax Liberty PSU
• nVidia Geforce 6800XT
• 36GB Western Digital Raptor
• Windows XP Professional SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP1

Testing:

Firstly I wanted to load an operating system to this drive and see how it performed as this was something the i-RAM was not capable of:

As you can see impressive speeds for a single drive. 

1xSATA

Then I moved on to the stock PCMark05 test.

I was also interested to see what a CPU overclock  would do for the drive as I was sure the drive could be faster.

The increased CPU speed does give an increase in drive speeds.

Again fast for a single drive and improved by the overclock but I did not want to spend too much time testing the ANS-9010 as a single drive. It’s party piece is having two SATA ports and the ability to run in RAID so the same drive space but much faster. I set up the drive as per the instructions and installed Windows XP on a 128kb stripe size, RAID-0 partition and repeated the tests.

2xSATA (RAID-0)

As you can see RAID really changes things for the better.

Seeing how well the ANS-9010 scored I ran just the HDD tests to see the scores it gave.

The figures speak for themselves even with stock CPU clocks its very fast. Now to up the CPU clocks and see what we get?

Again the extra clocks give an increase.

It was about now that I really started to like this drive.

Most impressive especially the write speed 255mb/s. I now really wanted to see what could be done with Server 2008 (seemed a little better than vista with drive speeds). All tests done using RAID this time.

The stock results are about the same as before but still fast. I did the same as before and increased the CPU clocks.

The scores are good but I think that they could be even better if a dedicated RAID card was used to take the load off the chipset and with a big CPU overclock things may improve but sadly I was unable to test this.

Conclusion:

The ACARD ANS-9010 is easy to set up and exceptionally fast. It was nice to see the speed of the ANS-9010 scale with CPU Mhz, it’s just a shame I don’t have a cascade phase-change cooling system and a 5Ghz+ Quad to see what it would do then. I think the main point is from a benching point of view the ANS-9010 beats 3x i-RAM at lower CPU clocks (i.e 4.2Ghz vs 5.2Ghz) so for PCMark05 it’s the one to have. Using this as a drive to run an operating system from would require the external power supply to make sure your drive holds the data. The ANS-9010 is well made and very fast but as always, fast comes at a price. Currently, the only UK stockist is Micro Direct at £387.29 but hopefully as it becomes more widely available this price will come down. The performance is excellent, which leaves the price as the only problem I can see with this drive. If you only need 2GB of storage on this drive, the price is ‘only’ just over £400. but to realistically stand a chance at loading an operating system onto it, the ANS-9010 plus 16GB DDR2 is around £620 or with 32GB DDR2 is £1592.41.

I would like to extend a huge thank you ACARD for the chance to review this drive and also to Crucial for the top quality memory.

Look out for further updates to this review as I push and tweak it further.