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REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
It is not often that we rave about a product but the Super Talent Dram USB 3.0 Express Dram Disk is deserving. The benefits to media professionals who manipulate and move very large media files constantly throughout the day are fantastic.
This can truly breath new life into Photoshop, CAD and other graphic intensive software. The only downfall that we see is that this would have been an ideal LSI SandForce powered solution with a higher capacity. Maybe down the road… For now though, we will just leave it as an Editor’s Choice!
Check out ST Dram Disk pricing at Amazon.
If I can get half the performance from DRAM disk that the editor is claiming on my aging 2007 HP Pavilion notebook that has win8 pro then I’m in !
to me it looks like just another flash drive with ramdisk software…
Another shitty review from a shitty site.
Hardware such as this has certain requirements. You need to have enough ram (16gb preferably) if you want a large “dram disk” such as 8gb or 32gb if you want 16gb. Two when you plug it in, it starts synchronizing what you have stored, so when you want to use it a minute later, it will already be saved in the ram, so they appear impossibly fast. Three, it only works on windows based computers and *appears* to require the included software to be installed on any computer you use it to function.
So I need to have enough free system RAM to make a RAM disk to hold the files, AND USB 3.0, AND Windows, AND the special software–all just to enable a background file copy? What’s the use since I can’t really do anything with the portable flash disk until the background sync from RAM is finished (which still happens at the same speed as a standard USB 3.0 flash key)?
The implication is that the DRAM lives on the pendrive but it does not (and cannot at that price). Ultimately it is only partially faster than a regular thumbdrive. Misleading marketing.
Perhaps you missed these statements…
“that uses PC memory to significantly improve performance”
“Using memory, most commonly refered to as ram disks, to improve system performance is not new by any means, however, lack of simplicity has kept this from becoming popular.”
What a terribly misleading product. As Jon points out (and the spec sheet backs up), this is merely a standard USB drive. All you are doing is “pre-copying” the file to RAM for later writing onto Flash. Eh? What’s the point? Now, if Supertalent put a 8GB of RAM on the thumb drive and used a battery backup to keep the RAM alive…then it could do what the article implies. But otherwise it’s just a bit of faking out the user. Ridiculous.
What is the source for the 2.5GB or larger movie transfer? Sounds like it already in memory. If on disk/SSD/flash then you could not get sub 1 second transfer speeds.
I don’t think these transfer to RAM Disk amazing times mean much, since it is the end to end transfer times that matter. The transfer from RAM disk to SuperTalent flash stick MATTERS. Am I missing something here? You are just measuring RAM speed, which is usually 10GByte/sec. You are not measuring the NAND flash die transfer speed.
You are right. The transfer is done in the new RAM drive from one spot to another in order to demonstrate (or at least try) the speeds achieved while using that drive. The flash drive was obviously too small and we think that using a larger data file might be able to yield numbers. The benefit of this drive is specifically geared towards those that work in media intensive data environments where manipulating the media benefits from such.
looks like this is marketed towards a very specific segment of customers, and not the general public, despite what it may visually appear to be.
Interesting drive. Now you’ve got me wanting yet another cool device!
Once installed how long does it take to initiate the next time you plug it in? How long does it take to properly disconnect the drive? Does the Dram space vanish on PC shutdown and have to be reloaded the next time the device is plugged in?
So what’s the real transfer speed of the pendrive? (not the RAM)..
63MB/s read and 6MB/s write. Having spoken to Super Talent, be ready for a speedier release in the future and try to keep in mind that this drive syncs in the background while you work.
Will this work on Win8 ?
I have
an ASUS Zen Ultrabook i7 with 4GB on board RAM with USB3 (windows7). When away
from the office I am frequently running 3D software packages such as 3D Rhino,
which are RAM hungry at times. To speed things up significantly would the USB
3.0 Express Dram?Disk
be of any benefit to me and if so what size (as I only have 4Gb on board and there is some sort of ratio which I don’t understand either) – when rhino is open I have 40% left – work files are usually in the region of 250-500mb. Is the work files that I would be synchronizing?
any feedback would be appreciated
This USB drive is a waste of money. I bought it thinking I would be able to use it as an external volatile RAM disk. I wanted to put a 2 gigabyte file on the USB drive so I could access it very fast. My laptop only has 2 gigabyte memory. The best I could get was 764mb of my own laptop’s memory, and I could have done that with free software from the net anyway.