Comment by johndunne
3 years ago
Fascinating read. The read/write performances are impressive. But the whole time I was reading the article I kept thinking... Imagine the performance of a ddr4... no, ddr5 ram!
I'd love to get my hands on one of these and try out a pxe booted os.
There's a blog post about their DDR4 version from last month. Sustained read and write speeds of 15GB/s for sequential operations, with about 3GB/s for random I/O seem to be the expected throughput.
I don't know what loads demand such high persistent throughputs, but that's one place SSDs still can't compete, as performance quickly drops when their DRAM cache fills up.
Still, NVMe drives to up to 10GB/s these days, I think we're close to reaching a point where the PCIe overhead towards these RAM drives will soon make them unable to compete with persistent storage for performance. Preventing wear will be the only reason to go for these RAM drives.
If you want to try to experience the performance of a RAM based PCIe computer, there's very little preventing you from dedicating a portion or RAM to a RAM disk, copying your boot image to that, and running directly from RAM. Several Linux recovery images are built to do exactly that, in fact. If you want to run Windows or something else that doesn't have such functionality out of the box, I imagine using a lightweight Linux VM to bootstrap (and forward) your OS peripherals may solve that problem for you as well.
You have DDR4 memory or DDR5 memory as your normal RAM? Then you can make a RAMDisk using any number of software available on internet. And then you can test said drive using AS SSD Benchmark (same as the article's author).
Imagine a Beowulf cluster supported by these!