Theoretical, what is faster, RAM drive or RAID NVMe?

[Big.Wayne]

If you wanted a large amount of really fast storage, what would be the best option between a dedicated RAM drive vs a blazing fast PCI-E 4.0 NVMe RAID array?

I thought a RAm drive would be faster but I overheard someone say the RAID-0 NVMe array would be able to perform better read-write operations, if you stacked enough of them?

 

[kindai]

if you stacked enough of them?

"it depends" on the hardware used.

 

[MagicBoy]

That'd depend on the hardware. Likely the RAM drive on pure synthetic benchmarks.

 

[Big.Wayne]

So if you wanted to build some fast storage for a millionaire, what option would be best out of the two?

Isn't there a limit to how many NVMe drives you can have on the PCI-E lanes?

 

[Minstadave]

So if you wanted to build some fast storage for a millionaire, what option would be best out of the two?

Isn't there a limit to how many NVMe drives you can have on the PCI-E lanes?

Linus tech tips built a massive NVME array and it ran like ass.

https://youtu.be/xWjOh0Ph8uM

 

[Rroff]

RAM drive likely has better latency but downside of volatility. Read/write depends a lot on the setup I don't think either directly wins out - the actual speeds of a RAM drive is often quite a bit below the on paper memory performance for various reasons and can hold up better in synthetic benchmarks than in real world use in some usage cases vs NVME RAID.

 

[MagicBoy]

Yeh, biggest problem with a RAM drive is it's not persistent. Power the machine off and the data's gone. You'd need some sort of backing store. NVMe is quick enough that there's no real need for a modern equivalent of the old Gigabyte I-RAM with a battery backup.