ACARD ANS-9010B ramdrive

[davecason]

The Acard has a battery backup like the iRam and also has a slot for a compactflash card for backup purposes. I guess what I'm asking is how do you do the restore before booting?

I bought some really fast compact flash and the three drive controllers in my server makes my boot time quite long.

You could also:

• Hit the pause key during boot and wait for the lights on the ANS-9010 to stop flashing.

• Power the drive externally (like I do;I keep it outside and use a power supply from a SATA-to-USB adapter) so it hasn't lost power so you don't have to wait for restoration.

 

[jmke]

I did a quick comparo of the ANS-9010 vs a Vertex SSD to see if it would make a world of difference to upgrade from a fast SSD to a "silly" fast ACARD.
http://www.madshrimps.be/gotoartik.php?articID=935

 

[jimhsu]

Really though consumer filesystems like NTFS or ext3 aren't designed for storage media with fast random access times in general. I.e. I know linux preemptively orders I/O operations in an elevator algorithm which is then sent to disk - that is an unnecessary source of latency for an SSD. NTFS has the same problems...

 

[davecason]

That review was fun. It illustrates why I was interested in the drive: I want to use it with databases and massive data normalization.

I have a team at work that has just recently purchased a massive i7-based dual qual-core Xeon system that we plan to try a few things with. The first pass is to try and normalize about a billion records a day from flat files using this system. We are going to first try to do the work from ram drives, and, if we need the RAM as ram, from a drive like the ACARD. We may also try putting the resulting database on the ACARD.

We have 96GB of ram so I'll let you guys know how it goes.

 

[Idontcare]

Dave, I forget but did you ever make any comparisons between ACARD and the FusionIO drives that are out now? Given the IOP transaction capabilities of fusionIO I would think it would be your "second best thing next to a software-based ram-drive" option.

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: davecason
We have 96GB of ram so I'll let you guys know how it goes.

Oh, my ... It's so BIG!



Bet that's fun to play around with.

 

[davecason]

I found another problem with my I/O tests is that every controller cheats a little with RAM. HBA's do it with specific RAM, and motherboards do it with system ram. I'm going to have to buy more RAM for my RAID controllers to see how that affects the results.

 

[davecason]

Fusion I/O has the option to saturate the PCI-e channel it is attached to rather then dealing with the constraints of SATA. One trade for that proprietary connection is that it cannot be used to boot. I was considering buying a second one so I can set up a RAID0 with 4 drives, a RAID5, a RAID6, and a RAID10 array for more fun. I'll let you guys know.

 

[automobile]

Could someone share a firmware? 1.xx 2.00 and 2.05?

 

[oqwaymnf]

Hello anyone tell me please I use Acard ANS-9010 16 GB (2GBx8 slots) but it see only 7.66 nor jumper installed, I check all firmwares 1.09-2.05 in all firmwares it see only 7.66GB (I use AHCI Sata and IDE no matter I get the same result ) I've checked memory by firmware utilities in 1.01 and 1.060 all be ok, I extract dimms from slots and use air cleaner for slots and dimms (result the same), I give memory dimms my friend with the same device but his device see all my memory modules what's wrong? Help me anynody, please.