FWIW - Acard RAM Drives

[Savage1701]

FWIW, I just got my hands on one of the 8-stick version 5.25" RAM drives from Acard today. Faster than a cheetah chasin' down a fat kid. Just about saturated my GbE network at between 65-90+ MB/sec transfer of a 10GB dv file between the Acard drive and a 3Ware 9590SE RAID 6 array.

HD Tune shows 160MB/sec sustained read. Granted, it's a synthetic, and I am running the SATA port as enhanced IDE, but this thing is just unreal.

Blows away the i-RAM's in terms of convenience and expansion (will handle up to 8Gb sticks of DDR2 RAM according to Acard). Have (8) 2Gb sticks in mine.

Forget Gigabyte's vaporware i-Box. If you have been waiting for a RAM drive with size, this is it.

 

[LNCPapa]

That setup should easily be able to saturate your GbE network. Try binding a couple of NICs on those machines and re-running your tests - I'd be willing to bet you break 1 Gb/sec. What you might be running into is TCP overhead or something similar keeping you from reaching higher speeds. Your RAM drive should be faster than your RAID array - and my RAID 5 benches in bonnie++ at 379MB/sec - so I can't believe that your network wouldn't be the bottleneck.

Still, I'd love to get my hands on one of those Acrads

 

[Savage1701]

LNC - thanks for the reply. I've puttered with bonding NIC's to try to get higher throughput, but was always under the impression that the max you could get from one IP address was 1Gb/s in the case of a GbE network. Is there a way around that?

 

[LNCPapa]

They've been doing NIC teaming/bonding for some time now as an alternative to more expensive methods of getting higher bandwidth. Some believe it works like RAID5 where it's n-1, but that's not true either as far as I can tell. You get both added redundancy for your network along with increased throughput - until a NIC dies on you. BTW, my machine shows 1 external IP address on my bound NIC.