ALLONE Cloud Disk Drive 101 RAMDisk Review (32GB) – 500K IOPS of DDR3 Storage

It’s not every day that we see an SSD that makes us stop and think.  After our trip to Computex, we were able to take delivery of something that is fairly unique in terms of enterprise storage.  The ALLONE Cloud Disk Drive 101 RAMDisk is not your normal SSD, in fact, it really isn’t an SSD at all. Technically speaking, it is a battery backed, PCIe-based RAM disk.  RAM disks are nothing new. They have been around as long as we can remember.

AllOne Packaging 2

The intent is to, through software, take a portion of system memory and present it to the OS as a storage device.  By doing this, you create a tiered storage solution where you can cache frequently used data and access it at DRAM speed.  They were more popular at a time where storage was painfully slow when compared to CPUs and RAM.  With SSDs, specifically PCIe SSDs, storage speed has increased to a point where storage is less of a bottleneck, but it is still nowhere near the speed of system memory.

Allone-Application

The issue with traditional RAM disks is that they are volatile.  When power is removed, the data on them disappears.  They also take up valuable system memory and bandwidth.  One solution is to take the DRAM off of the memory bus and put it on a PCIe add-in card, which exactly is what ALLONE has done.

Now, this is not a new idea.  There have been multiple companies over the years that have tried, unsuccessfully, to push this type of product to market.  For the most part, those products still used a SATA interface, which greatly limited the effectiveness of the solution. The DDRDrive X1, ACard’s ANS-9010 and Gigabyte’s i-RAM are all examples of solutions that failed to gain acceptance.  ALLONE hopes their Cloud Disk Drive 101 offers performance that can’t be overlooked.

SPECIFICATION

The Cloud Disk Drive 101 comes in two flavors.  Today we are reviewing the Storage Turbo, which comes equipped with 32GB of capacity in the form of 4 Kingston DDR3 modules.  Those modules are backed up with a 3000mA battery backup.  In case of power loss, the DRAM is backed by 6 Kingston microSD cards, for a total of 48GB.  The Cache Pro solution is similar, but lacks the SD backup capabilities and has lower overall performance.

AllOne RAMDisk Specs

Random performance is impressive at nearly half a million IOPS, but that is at 512 bytes.  We are used to random performance rated at 4KB workloads, so we will have to see how the Cloud Disk Drive 101 handles larger workloads.  The sequential numbers are a bit low, but considering the PCIe x4 Gen 1 interface, which has a real-world bandwidth of 800-900MB/s, it is not surprising.

There are a few advantages that this type of architecture has that typical SSD don’t.  The first, and by far the most important, is write endurance.  Even the very best SSDs on the market have a finite life based on bytes written.  The Cloud Disk Drive 101 has no such limitation.  Theoretically, DRAM has infinite write endurance.  As a caching solution, you will never have to worry about the type of workload.

Secondly, the Cloud Disk Drive has a very low power consumption.  Typically, products that produce this level of performance are PCIe devices that can consume upwards of 25W.  At slightly over 7W of active power draw, the IOPS/W ratio is excellent.

But, all of this comes at a price.  The Storage Turbo will retail for $15,000 while the Cache Pro is $6,000.  Those prices will be hard to swallow for consumers.  What remains to be seen is whether enterprise customers can see value in this solution.

16 comments

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    4? Random Reads @ QD1 reached 60KIOPS or am i starting to grow old ‘n’ losing my vision ?

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    How much for this?

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    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………

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    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…

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      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.

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    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).

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    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.

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      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

  7. blank

    LOL 15K with that money I’d get ultradimm, SSD on ram slots.

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    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.

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    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.

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    What a fucking ripoff!!!

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    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.

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