Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Internals:  

The Viking SATADIMM - Enterprise SandForce punch packed into a DIMM! - Storage 32

It’s hard to believe they crammed a 200GB SSD onto a single DIMM!
(this is actually 256GB of flash, mounted on both sides of the board).

The Viking SATADIMM - Enterprise SandForce punch packed into a DIMM! - Storage 33

DIMM slots have significantly lower voltage present, so the SATADIMM must boost the ~1.25VDC to function properly. This is done via the switching power supply seen here on the left of the daughter card. To the right we see the SuperCap present with all 

The Viking SATADIMM - Enterprise SandForce punch packed into a DIMM! - Storage 34
From left: OCZ RevoDrive x2, SATADIMM, ioDrive 160, Samsung 470 (upper), Samsung PB22-J (lower)

While most of us are familiar with the size of a standard DIMM, I felt the need to lay it out against some other storage solutions for some perspective.

         

Testing Methods 

Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks.  PCMark, IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases.  If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we’ll help you out!     

Test System Setup  

We have switched our testbed over to a more dedicated, forward thinking machine.  We made some changes to help minimize test data scatter with higher bandwidth devices.  Sound is flat out disabled, with no additional card installed.  Video was *intentionally* shifted to a PCI unit to free up both PCIe-16 slots for testing tandem pairs of PCI Express cards (like ioDrives, DDRdrives, and high end RAID cards).  Spot checks against the previous rig showed a negligible change in test output.     

PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and BFG for supplying some of the components of our test rig.     

Hard Drive Test System Setup
CPU Intel Core i7 920 @ 4 GHZ (HT disabled)
Motherboard Asus P6T
Memory Corsair Dominator 6GB DDR3-1600
Hard Drive G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD
Sound Card N/A
Video Card BFG Geforce 8400 GS 512MB PCI
Video Drivers Geforce 181.22
Power Supply Corsair CMPSU-650TX
DirectX Version DX9.0c
Operating System Windows XP X64 SP2   
Windows 7 X64 (for TRIM testing)

  • PCMark05
  • Yapt
  • IOMeter
  • HDTach
  • HDTune     
  • PCPer File Copy Test
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