Introduction:

A few weeks ago, the laptop on which I'm writing this article crashed due to my own clumsiness. The notebook slipped out of my hands and hit the ground, even bouncing off a few times; this resulted in a hard disk drive failure. Since I had to replace my hard disk drive, I went out looking for a bigger and better product: at least 7200rpm and if possible SSD. The prices of the SSD's are still a bit too high, so I went for a 7200rpm Western Digital disk drive, which would be only a tad faster than my old, broken 5400rpm. Turns out, my Windows Vista installation runs a lot more fluent and the number of hick-ups has decrease dramatically.

This was actually the first time I experienced the incredible bottleneck of the harddisk drive. Of course, I know the impact of iRam and other ramdisk based storage drives in benchmarks such as PCMark05, but ... those are just benchmarks and don't always reflect the real-life performance of hardware. Switching to 7200rpm harddisks, together with our latest HDD versus SSD article, made me wonder how dramatically the switch to a ramdisk based storage medium would be. Luckily, Acard was kind enough to send me a new DDR2-ramdisk based module, the ANS-9010, to test this out.



In this article, we'll let normal platter hard disk drives compete against new-tech SSD's and of course ram disk based configurations. Thanks to Johan, a member of the Madshrimps overclocking team, we were able to put the Gigabyte iRam to test as well.

Additionally we'll have a look at the performance of a Raid 0 configuration compared to single drive configurations.