A-RAM's atypical SSD offers good speeds, but you'll want to be careful about how much data you pack onto it.
There are a few schools of thought when it comes to data; some suggest you should damn well be happy with your rotating platter thank-you-very-much, while others tell you to buy a bunch of SSDs and run 'em all in RAID. A-RAM, a new player in the SSDspace, think that you should compromise between both those camps: grab a single fast SSD. A tricky balancing act, to be sure, but one that they handle pretty well.
Their Ultra II Series drives come packed with the shiny Sandforce SF-1200 controller, a huge improvement over the Indilinx controller that other drives have at their cores, alongside 50GB's worth of flash chips. This is perhaps where the value prospect becomes muddied; yes, you can get a Sandforce-based drive for under three hundred bucks, but it ain't gonna be huge. Still, 50GB should be relatively ok for most OS installs - assuming you keep all your media and games (and most likely some larger programs) on traditional rotating storage.
Performance isn't as good as the OCZ Vertex LE that uses the same controller, though it's still very respectable. Average read speeds top out at 224MB/s with a random access time of 0.1ms and a burst of 233.8MB/s, and when the drive is totally full of junk data - which doesn't actually take that long - performance goes backwards. Read speeds hit 201.5MB/s and burst drops to 230.1MB/s, suggesting that you'll want to keep this drive relatively free. Thankfully, it supports TRIM for auto data-cleaning, but it's still pretty constrictive. For the price though, not much can compete.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012