ACard ANS-9010 RAM Drive

[combhua]

it makes sense that finding a file split over 2 drives (2 seeks) takes a longer amount of time than the same file on 1 drive (1 seek)

They both seek at the same time. Raid0 doubles transfer rate (with 2 drives) but does not impove access time, but should not make it worse ... unless the seek times are not sycronized for some reason.

Short answer: The slower seek will make any faster seeks wait anyway. So your effective times are now always the worst of the two.


Long answer
Well, this may be more abstract than you care to know. Say average seek times are 0.100 seconds. So over the course of many seeks, the average should be 0.100. This implies that there are some seeks which took longer than 0.100 seconds and some which were faster. Still with me?

So it's just as likely that a seek taking 0.070 seconds on one drive, takes 0.130 seconds on the other. Well, the effective seek is now 0.130 seconds, even if the first drive did it in 0.001 seconds.

[not5150]

$1200 for 32GB seems absurd to me.

Cool idea, but geezsus! You guys must have a money tree in your backyards.

It's for all those people that want to say, "Nyah Nyah, I zoned in three seconds faster than you did."

For that money, I'll max out my mobo ram AND get an Intel SSD.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Long answer
Well, this may be more abstract than you care to know. Say average seek times are 0.100 seconds. So over the course of many seeks, the average should be 0.100. This implies that there are some seeks which took longer than 0.100 seconds and some which were faster. Still with me?

So it's just as likely that a seek taking 0.070 seconds on one drive, takes 0.130 seconds on the other. Well, the effective seek is now 0.130 seconds, even if the first drive did it in 0.001 seconds.

Seek times are different depending where on the disk the data is. I would assume though that raid controller designers are savy enough to know that and place data that was split at the same spots on both drives at the same time, else, as you correctly point out, seek times would suffer. Of course they cannot do anything about rotational lantecy, but I doubt that thats a lot. Ya maybe raid0 does have some access time problems, with Hard drives, but the Intel SSD has internal Raid0 and dosnt suffer from these problems. Still what you say is logical and should be given consideration when going to Raid0.

At any rate if the files are all tiny like they seem to be in wow raid is not much improvment:

Using 1 Mitron loading quake was same as NINE Raid0 Mitron SSD drives:

http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/

Quoted
As you can see in all of the games, we are averaging a load speed increase of 68% over the Western Digital Raptor 150 compared to the single Mtron 16GB. The speed increase is truly incredible with this solid state drive. Now, please remember the Horsepower/Torque analogy that I discussed earlier in this article. Even though we are adding more horsepower (more drives and sustained throughput), latency and random access time (torque) remains the same. For Quake 4 we displayed an identical load time telling me that this game has a large amount of small blocks of files during load. However, for games that required a little more large file seeking on the drive we displayed minor increases in load time while scaling in raid. FEAR is the only game that actually scaled tremendously with more drives. When I loaded up FEAR on the 9 drive setup, Level 1 was pretty much loaded as soon as I clicked the mouse. Pretty incredible to say the least. Based on all of my results, not to mention having the ability to personally get a taste of all of these different test setups I am going to say the ultimate current choice in SSD technology is going to be a 2 X 16GB Mtron Pro Raid 0 setup for gaming.

[Catamer]

Sorry, I didn't find the ram drives to be so cheap when I searched the internet. you must have found a better source for them than I did.

.11 msec access time ( or latency ) ?

the intel x25-e claims to have 75uSec latency.
x25-e

and I don't have to copy the data over to the drive at startup and it's probably fast enough you don't need a raid anyway.
I know I'm biased because I'm using the x25-e and only put WoW on it and symlinked it to it's old location.
I've noticed a pretty good improvement on load times as I'm sure anyone using these ram drives would.

to each his own I guess.

[Greythan]

$1200 for 32GB seems absurd to me.

Cool idea, but geezsus! You guys must have a money tree in your backyards.

Are you serious Fur?

How much total money have you spent on your systems over the past five years? I will tell you right know the average person would say its "absurd".

I would have hoped we'd all have learned by now that spending on hardware is all relative. I'm pretty sure the average person outside this community would look at the base line fact that we're paying multiple monthly fees to multi-box as superfluous; let alone what many of us spend on hardware/software to support multiboxing.

[Sam DeathWalker]

.110 ms is 110uSec.