Some time ago Objective Analysis ran nearly 300 standard benchmarks on a PC with varying amounts of flash and DRAM and found that a dollar’s worth of flash provided a greater performance boost than a dollar’s worth of DRAM once the DRAM size grew above a certain minimum (1-2GB) depending on the benchmark.
You might wonder how this could possibly be true. Everyone knows that best way to improve any computing system’s performance is to add DRAM main memory. How could flash, which is orders of magnitude slower than DRAM, provide a bigger performance boost than DRAM?
It all makes sense if you think of the DRAM of something that is there only to make the HDD look faster. More is better, but if you can use a little less DRAM and add a large flash memory layer then disk accesses appear to speed up even more.
The benchmark data and the price/performance findings that are Continue reading “Flash vs. DRAM in PCs – Flash Wins”