ACARD ANS-9010 Arizona

ACARD isn't the most emotive brand name, but the Taiwanese company makes a wide range of storage products, from RAID controllers to CD duplicators, and now SSDs.




Like the ANS-9010B, the ANS-9010 is a RAM drive, so it uses DRAM to store data rather than NAND flash. As DRAM is volatile, it loses data when the power is switched off, the ANS-9010 includes a small battery and CompactFlash reader (card not supplied), which automatically backs up the content of the DRAM when you shut down your PC. Like the ANS-9010B, the ANS-9010 is a 5.25in drive, but has eight rather than six DIMM sockets, so it can support up to 64GB of ECC or standard unbuffered DDR2. For example, you could populate the ANS-9010 with 16GB of Corsair XMS2-6400C5 for £205.12 inc VAT, nearly ten times less than the cost of populating the Hyperdrive4 with RAM.





In its standard configuration, the ANS-9010 performed identically to the lower-capacity ANS-9010B, achieving an incredible average read rate of 175.2MB/sec and a write rate of 145MB/sec. The real-world benchmark results are also very strong, with the ANS-9010 loading Crysis in record time.




The ANS-9010 has two S-ATA II ports, so if your PC has a RAID controller, by changing a jumper on the back of the drive, each bank of four DIMMs can act as a separate drive, thereby treating the ANS-9010 as a RAID 0 array. In this configuration, the ANS-9010 proved to be even faster than in single-drive mode, reading data at 195.4MB/sec, and writing at 155.5MB/sec. However, even our overclocked quad-core CPU wasn't able to take full advantage of the ANS-9010 in RAID 0, as the real-world benchmark scores barely improved.




While we'd hesitate to recommend that every reader should buy a RAM drive, the ANS-9010, particularly when operating in RAID 0, is ludicrously fast. If you're a keen benchmarker, or need very high sustained transfer rates or a lot of IO/sec, then the ANS-9010 is a must-have.

Author: James Gorbold & Antony Leather

Custom PC Online