[AccessD] Solid State Disk performance

I have a pretty specialized application where I need a ~2 gbyte "ram disk" to hold some files that 
are continuously accessed by a third party program.  The problem was that my virtual machines would 
not recognize an "external" (on the host machine) ram drive, plus it just sucked up memory.

I had purchased a 4 gbyte hardware ram disk i-Ram and it worked, but it was limited by the fact that 
it was "only" 4 gigs and that it used the old SATA 1 interface.  As a result it "only" achieved 
about 125 mbyte per second access.

When used with a single Virtual Machine running this application, it would work blazing fast, 
processing about 4-5 million records / hour, however when I would try to access the i-Ram with 
multiple virtual machines, performance on each would drop down to under two million records / hour. 
  It would work, but the performance on each machine would be about 1/2 of the performance when only 
one machine accessed the i-ram.

Recently the Solid State Disks have had tremendous performance increases as well as literally a new 
controller etc.  To make a long story short, I bought one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227393

to see if it would fit the bill for my ram drive.  I now have two virtual machines running this 
software and both of them are running as fast as when using the old I-Ram.  4.8 million records / 
hour on one VM (with two processors assigned) and ~4 million per hour on a second VM with just a 
single processor assigned.

Next up is to set all the VMs to use only a single processor and try to get three VMs working 
simultaneously.

These Solid State Disks have limitations, particularly when trying to WRITE back to the disk, but 
this specific application only writes the files once per software update (every two months) but 
continuously READS the data while performing this process.  Thus for my application, this thing is a 
very solid win!!!

The i-Ram was a good idea but they never continued to advance the hardware and it has become almost 
obsolete now.  I paid about $250 for the i-ram hardware plus 4 dimms, for 4 gigs of ram disk.  The 
SSD was about $125 for 30 gigs of memory, plus it is about twice as fast for reads.

Very cool!!!

-- 
John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com