X-bit labs

SSD, i-RAM and Traditional Hard Disk Drives (page 9)

Category: Storage

by Aleksey Meyev

[ 04/23/2008 | 08:05 PM ]

The SSDs don’t feel at ease under loads typical of workstations because of the high percentage of writes. As you can see, the SSDs are slower than the other devices at every request queue depth. Their performance should be roughly similar to 2.5” HDDs with a spindle rotation speed of 5400rpm.

If the i-RAM could accommodate an OS, it would make a perfect storage for a top-performance workstation. Alas, its capacity is too low. On the other hand, you can use it to store the swap files of Windows or Adobe Photoshop, can’t you?

When the test zone is reduced to 32GB, the advantage of the HDDs is even more conspicuous as they work in the faster part of the platters. The heads have to travel a shorter distance, too. The reduction doesn’t affect the performance of the Solid State Drives. For them, every memory cell is just like any other memory cell. The Gigabyte i-RAM has the same results due to its small capacity.

The Gigabyte i-RAM is unrivalled again.