8GB Solid-State Drives A Reality for ~$1500

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SEALTeamSix

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The Inq said:
The last review of today is not really one. I found that product online and would like to share it with you. It is the Hyperdrive III which is basically a card which allow you to build a solid state hard disk. At ~$700 for the nude card, it is not cheap especially since you would probably have to fill the eight empty banks with 1GB modules to get only 8GB of hard disk space. But its sheer performance and the fact that it will not lose any information if your PC is shut down means that it should be a winner. What's more exciting is that it can be used with a RAID card and is treated like a normal IDE hard disk. Some information. It has a sustained data rate of more than 90MB/s on ATA100 bus and a seek time of 100 microseconds, 40 times faster than the fastest hard disk. XP installs on it i four minutes and a full format takes only the time of a click.
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Inq Link
Manufacturer Link -> Products -> Bottom of Page

Because you can use any speed of DDR memory, and 1gb of PC2100 is $75-$100, an 8gb drive would cost $1300-$1500 total.

-SEAL
 
That's really cool. They should have used SATA to get those "150MB/sec" speeds.
 
Daynja said:
That's really cool. They should have used SATA to get those "150MB/sec" speeds.
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They only typically do 80-95MB/sec sustained, so ATA100 was fine... however, since the newer motherboards coming out all have SATA, they might have been better off that way. SCSI, eat your heart out!

-SEAL
 
awwww, i want one... Probably don't need one.. but it is still cool..
 
I should also say that it now supports up to 16GB.

Although it did mention everything being lost in the event of a power loss. That's too bad.
 
I don't understand how it can be "40 times" faster when it's still limited to the ATA-100 interface :confused:
 
EnderW said:
I don't understand how it can be "40 times" faster when it's still limited to the ATA-100 interface :confused:
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They're just saying the seek times are that much faster. The disk is still transferring at 100 MB/s, just seeking at effectively zero cost.
 
I bet the transfer rate is limited by the ATA-100 bus, not the speed of the RAM. Even PC133 is running with a transfer rate of over 1 GB/S, right?
 
unhappy_mage said:
They're just saying the seek times are that much faster. The disk is still transferring at 100 MB/s, just seeking at effectively zero cost.
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I realize that, but if it installs XP in 4min, then it's still about 10x faster.
How important is bandwidth vs seek time?
 
Daynja said:
I should also say that it now supports up to 16GB.

Although it did mention everything being lost in the event of a power loss. That's too bad.
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No it didn't, it specifically said that it doesn't - it has a battery that keeps the drive supplied with power while the computer is off.

EnderW said:
I don't understand how it can be "40 times" faster when it's still limited to the ATA-100 interface
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That claim is probably made based on the seek time, which is the 100 microseconds (as opposed to 8-12 milliseconds of normal drives). As far as being limited by the ATA-100 interface - this drive is not capable of handling a sustained 100 MB/s of data, so the bus speed is not a bottleneck.

Jonsey said:
I bet the transfer rate is limited by the ATA-100 bus, not the speed of the RAM. Even PC133 is running with a transfer rate of over 1 GB/S, right?
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I'm not sure what the limiting factor is, but according to their data it typically can handle 80-95 MB/s, so the bus is not the limit. I don't believe the limiting factor to be the RAM either - the RAM is effectively underclocked, which is why you can use whatever speed of DDR and not see any performance difference. Still, at the claimed speeds of the drive, I wouldn't worry too much about what's holding it back - it is still stupidly fast.

-SEAL
 
SEALTeamSix said:
No it didn't, it specifically said that it doesn't - it has a battery that keeps the drive supplied with power while the computer is off.
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For how long? an hour? That's as good as saying everything is lost when the power goes out.

at 90MB/sec it probably is the ATA100 limiting the speeds. You ever get 12.5MB/sec over 100Mbps lan?
 
Daynja said:
For how long? an hour? That's as good as saying everything is lost when the power goes out.
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The link at the start of the thread said:
It retains data when the PC is restarted or shutdown by having an independent power supply connected to the main PC power lead through a PCI slot blanking plate.
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In other words, it has its own independent 5V power source, as well as a battery to protect it from misc. unplugs.

Daynja said:
At 90MB/sec it probably is the ATA100 limiting the speeds.
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After I did a little research, it does seem that the ATA100 bus is in fact the limiting factor, because on timing inefficiencies and the overhead of using a parallel transfer design. With 0.1 ms timings (which they claim), it should be able to push 130 MB/s, so a SATA or SCSI would have been a better choice from a pure-performance standpoint. That said, it probably would have cost them at least a few months of production, they already have the fastest bootable hard drives known to the public, and they have investors that want to see profits now. Economically, it probably made sense to release the product now, as is.

Bear in mind that 93 MB/s figure is across the IDE bus, not internal. For internal operations (copies, reformats, defrags, etc), it is as fast as the pure electronics can go (hence the 400x speed claim).

More info on this drive can be had here.

-SEAL
 
93MBs sustained is still a hell of a lot faster than mostly anything you're going to get elsewhere on a single drive.
 
We run a 32Gig Solid State here. We call it "The Hemi". It's a sick little box.
35 grand for it though :eek:
 
this must be the coolest thing i have seen in a while. Maybe since AMD came out with the opteron.
 
There were 8GB Solid state drives on ebay going for $400. They used EDO ram, on a long PCI card.
 
Ice Czar said:
SSD
Solid State File-Caching for Performance and Scalability
Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
Solid State Disks Intro & FAQ
SSD more than just a big cache

personally I'll pass and just populate the other four slots and use
RAMdisk \ RamDisk that and a couple of .bat files to load and save the data make alot more sense to me ;)


but that is a substantial decrease in the entry level cost of an SSD :)
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You may have a lot of RAM slots because of your dually, but the hyper one seems to be a little better.. Since most folks can only have 4 gigs of ram on MB... the hyper drive supports 16GB.. even at 8 gigs you can store hl2 and won't have to worry about stuttering. Plus, you don’t have to keep on reloading your data.
 
yup having a mobo that supports 16GB is a bit "special" :p

for awhile I was looking at the various RAMdrive\PCI cards out there
eventually coming to the conclusion Id be far better off spending it elsewhere
 
lol....This makes me look forward to the day when solid state drives are affordable and have enough room for regular use.
 
Python14 said:
lol....This makes me look forward to the day when solid state drives are affordable and have enough room for regular use.
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just get 4 and raid 0 them ... more than enough room :p ... in a year or two, you can probably get a stick of 2 gig ram for like 100 bucks, so hopefully this works out..
 
Python14 said:
lol....This makes me look forward to the day when solid state drives are affordable and have enough room for regular use.
Click to expand...
And when they'll be truly non-volatile, e.g. using MRAM.

They might end up (finally) replacing FDs as well :p
 
mjz_5 said:
just get 4 and raid 0 them ... more than enough room :p ... in a year or two, you can probably get a stick of 2 gig ram for like 100 bucks, so hopefully this works out..
Click to expand...


Now only if I had $6,000 to spend on storage
 
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