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INTERNAL COMPONENTS
As we eluded to earlier, the ALLONE Cloud Disk Drive 101 is made up of 4 major components: DRAM, Controller, Battery and SD Card backup. These components are all located on a full height PCIe x4 Gen1 add-in card.
For the DRAM, ALLONE has chose Kingston’s HyperX PnP. This SO-DIMM DDR3-1600 module is of the 1.35V variety. In total, there are 4 SO-DIMM slots, giving us a total capacity of 32GB.
Next up is the RamCore M5338e controller. This controller manages the DRAM and SD backup operations.
The battery backup solution is a large 3.7V 3000mAh external battery that is held in place by a plastic bracket. The battery serves two purposes. The first is to maintain the power for the system when there are brief power failures.
The second is to hold that power on long enough to back up to the microSD cards. There is an LED indicator to show when batter power is being applied.
Finally, we have the 6 microSD cards, which are also Kingston. These 8GB modules are all class 10 and are in a RAID 5 configuration, so the loss of a single card does not cause data loss.
Each microSD slot also has an LED to indicate whether the card has been removed. It is interesting that ALLONE chose microSD cards for their backup and not more reliable on-board NAND. ALLONE made it clear to us that the microSD cards are for emergency situations only, so they should not see very much usage.
4? Random Reads @ QD1 reached 60KIOPS or am i starting to grow old ‘n’ losing my vision ?
How much for this?
ummm $15000
Oh wow, I thought it was only $6k. $15k for consumer grade ram, with consumer grade SD cards with gen 1 pci-e. Pass.
An overpriced solution in search of a problem. At 32GB about the only thing I could see it being used for is a high speed scratch area for database queries. Fortunately, I could just use a regular RAMdisk for that at almost no cost.
I expect to see these featured at overstock.com in the near future………
Read the results and realize where the limit is.
Most SSD are IOps limited, this thing is bandwidth limited. At QD32, it does not matter if you are doing 512B, 4k or 128k, multiply the Iops by the payload and you get the same limit (~600MB/s). They are limited by their PCIe gen1 x4.
Their RAM should be good for 32bits*4*1600Mbps=25.6GB/s.
If they can increase their RAM support (to 16GB or more SODIMM), have equivalent MicroSD (bunch of 16GB) and raise their bus to gen3 (4GB/s) or even better widen it to x8 or x16, then they may have an interesting product.
Until then, it will be *much* cheaper (and with better perfs) to dedicate some RAM for the same task…
I have no idea what this product is supposed to be used for. It’s pci-e 1x, no clue why, limits the bandwidth as you said. I’d like to see this with gen3 pciE and either a x8 or even x16 slot. If you need some low latency transactional ram, you purchase more ram. 16GB sticks are around 170 bucks for 1866mhz DDR3 ECC RAM, and around the 220 range for DDR4 2133. I can purchase a hell of a lot of ram before I’d use something like this, and even have so much money left over that I could put battery backups on top of my battery backups ensuring that the server doesn’t go down.
Additionally, this product seems about as enterprise grade as using a Samsung 840 Evo for your high-write database server. The fact that it uses 1600mhz commodity RAM with no ECC, commodity grade SD cards (That confuses me the most) and is priced at $6k mean that nobody will use this ever unless these are addressed.
Please stop making statements like “this is not an SSD”. It is! SSDs cover ALL solid state technologies for storage. While SSDs have become synonymous with flash storage in recent years, the two terms are not interchangeable. Enterprise storage companies rarely use the term SSD because it is non-descriptive of the underlying technology. They prefer to use terms like Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD).
With the performance of this, you’re better off getting 2011 platform (which supports 64GB of ram) ram disk software and a decent UPS. Its gonna end up much cheaper and faster.
with the storage you can install windows on it, while a ramdrive can’t do that ..;)
Still too much, if it was like 150-200 euros I might consider it
LOL 15K with that money I’d get ultradimm, SSD on ram slots.
So enterprise is willing to pay 15k USD for this, but apparently not the significantly less it’d cost to get 1TB of RAM in a machine and use a chunk of it as a RAM drive… Yeah right.
They have approximately the right market, but they have over priced an under-performing product. I agree with others that it needs at least PCIe 2.0 x8 and ECC DRAM to be worth half the asking price. But, I found this review because I do have need of a small, fast, infinite write, non-volatile storage for my mail server message queues. So, keep at it.
What a fucking ripoff!!!
What I want is a cheap unpopulated PCI card that will take all my old 256M, 512M, and 1GB DDR ram sticks and let me use it as a ramdisk for my swap file and temp folders. It’s not worth the effort to sell them and there are only so many keychains I need.