There’s been plenty of discussion about using NAND Flash memory to cache HDDs and now Super Talent has introduced 32- and 64-Gbyte Flash-based USB 3.0 stick drives that incorporate 32-Mbyte DRAM caches to boost small block random performance by up to 300%. DRAM caching is not particularly new for SATA and SAS SSDs designed to replace HDDs but the Super Talent USB 3.0 Express RAM Cache drive looks like an ordinary USB stick. It has a USB 3.0 interface and is backward compatible with USB 2.0 ports as well. The DRAM cache is needed because the much faster transfer rates possible with the USB 3.0 specification can easily outstrip the read/write speeds of the drive’s internal Flash memory. Quoting an email from Super Talent:

“Sequential read and write speeds only show how a drive will perform when copying large files. In 'real world' applications, we are often reading and writing 100's of smaller files and in some cases even booting to the drive. In these instances traditional flash deigns show their weakness and a caching system can dramatically improve performance. For example, say you wanted to copy 40 MP3 files to your flash drive. By adding a caching system, the Express RAM Cache drive can now write these same files 260% faster; instead of taking 13 seconds, this transfer now takes less than 5 seconds. As the file size decreases and the file count increase, this time savings becomes even more apparent.”

The 32- and 64-Gbyte versions of the Super Talent USB 3.0 Express RAM Cache list for $129 and $209 respectively.