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By Dr of crap on 9/8/2010 10:07:35 AM , Rating: 2
Unless this is used as my hard drive -

A - I can wait for the write / read process
my USB drives work just fine

B - I'm not buying until the price drops
my USB drives work just fine (my 4Gb was $15)

By invidious on 9/8/2010 10:24:16 AM , Rating: 4
A - 1080p media can't wait. Playing 1080p on usb 2.0 is unstable at best.

B - 4gb of old tech for $15 or 16gb of new tech for $40? I will take the better storage per dollar and faster performance one. If it lives up to the hype this is a very attractive flash drive.

By XZerg on 9/8/2010 10:52:59 AM , Rating: 2
1080p will play just fine on usb3.0 but having a usb drive that has RAM on it seems a bit overdone... very much doubt people needing that sort of performance from a USB drive...

By Argon18 on 9/8/10, Rating: -1


... Firewire still exists... who knew.

Evidently, Argon18 did.

By hyvonen on 9/9/2010 4:06:28 PM , Rating: 1
Yeah, I wanna see a thumb drive with a FireWire port

By ajdavis on 9/8/2010 11:07:20 AM , Rating: 2
I think the media file examples people are using are a poor fit for this technology. In the IT market this could be nice though. If I make an image of a Windows 7 machine right now it takes an awful long time. If this can just speed that up I'd be willing to fork over a couple hundred bucks. Being able to keep current images (they can change quite often) would definitely improve efficiency and minimize unnecessary downtime.

By amanojaku on 9/8/2010 11:14:13 AM , Rating: 2
All you need to know is written above:
I learned this when writing programs and analyzing customer software for performance: you always want to write to the fastest storage, which is DRAM. No matter how small the data is it still takes resources to initiate, complete, and verify the write. Outside of CPU registers, no current storage system is as fast, or expensive, as DRAM. Even NAND flash is slower, as seen in expensive cache modules for enterprise SAN arrays: DRAM stores data in 1ns, while NAND flash does it in 2-4ns. The above numbers are WAY faster than consumer device memory, but I'm using these extreme numbers to make a point: their numbers are closer to each other than the values of consumer memory, and DRAM is STILL 2-4x faster than flash. Compare your desktop RAM at around 20ns and flash at 65us. That's a "mu", not an "en".

What's this got to do with USB sticks? Well, there are thousands, if not millions, of I/O writes per file. File systems may have 4-64KiB clusters, and an MP3 file may be 6MiB or more. That's 12,288 writes at a minimum for a 4KiB FAT32. A 4.7GiB ISO is approximately 1,232,077 writes; that's 80 seconds, ideally. The largest USB flash drive I've seen is 256GiB. We're talking hard drive replacement and/or backup. You need a cache to optimize storage writes as you probably won't write a single 58KiB Word file to a drive like this. You will most likely drag all of My Documents (more specifically My Porn Pics, My Stupid Ass Jokes, and My Stupid Ass Party Photos) to this, as well as ISOs, EXEs, etc...

Your old 4GiB stick doesn't need a cache. You aren't dropping a lot of data in there, anyway, so you can wait 3 (4GiB/4KiB @ 65us = 68 seconds, plus overhead) minutes for the drive to fill up. Maybe even 10 minutes. 256GiB at that rate would take ~3 hours, longer for lots of small files. A cache can speed up those tiny writes, or ensure the disk has enough data in the buffer to write at the optimal speed. You've seen this with CD-R software, where the larger buffer was best. Same for hard drives. Large storage necessitates cache.


By Motoman on 9/8/2010 11:54:40 AM , Rating: 2
A. For small stuff, current USB 2.0 stuff is OK. But, on occassion, I have found myself trying to copy, say, a 20Gb server backup file onto a 32Gb USB 2.0 USB stick - and that process is GLACIAL. Takes over an hour.

B. The 32Gb price for that RAM Cache unit is about twice the cost of what I paid for my 32Gb USB 2.0 unit. If it's a bajillion times faster, as advertised, then it's worth it.







By ekv on 9/8/2010 1:46:41 PM , Rating: 3
A - ditto.

B - $15 / 4 GB = 3.75

For Express RamCache drive
$129 / 32 GB = 4.03
$209 / 64 GB = 3.27

For Express drive
$99 / 32 GB = 3.09
$59 / 16 GB = 3.69

Prices appear cost effective, especially considering USB 3.0 vs. 2.0 speed advantage (not to mention RamCache advantage).

