Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB

The first contestant is for reference figures only as its performance will be very low compared to any ram disk drive. This 250GB Western Digital drive is a very normal hard disk, nothing fancy or special in terms of features and performance, a type of disk drive which you find in most home computers.



This is how most of your hard disk drives will look like.



The Caviar SE drives have an onboard cache of 8MB and spin at 7200 rpm.

OCZ Core Series V2 60GB

The second type of disk drive is the new SSD technology, represented by the OCZ Core series in this article. Originally, I didn't plan to include an SSD in the testing procedure, but since my colleague (Thorgal) wanted to lend me two, I gave this new technology a go. Not without troubleshooting, though, but more on that later in this article.



The SSD is a bit smaller than the 3,5" platter disks. These fit perfectly in your laptop and to fit them in your desktop computer, you'll have to use a 2,5"-to-3,5" retention bracket.



Close-up shot of the specifications.

Gigabyte iRam

The only real direct competitor of the Acard is this Gigabyte iRam device. This was, as far as I know, one of the very first high performance memory-based disk drives. The concept is very simple: instead of using slow magnetic platters, use high-speed memory as storage medium to improve latencies and in the end decrease loading times of games or your OS.



Each iRam can hold four DDR memory sticks, which means that the total capacity of one iRam is rather limited.



In this configuration, we used 4x1GB of memory



There's a reset button present!