Anybody have a HyperDrive?

Magik Smoke

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 11, 2004
Messages
495
New system build coming and I'm debating up grades...

My options are:

A) Hyperdrive
B) A good phase chiller...

I do a fair amount of gaming and encoding and I'm having some difficulty deciding which to go for.

Unfortunately, I don't have the $$$$ for both so help me make up my mind. :p

<!-Edit to add link->
https://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/purchase.htm
 
phase chiller for sure.

you can always just run raid 0 and get similar speeds. (in real world applications)
 
Ok I'm going to play devils advocate for the hyperdrive here:

"Real world" applications are almost all I/O-bound or GPU-bound anymore. (Remember this debate from when Core-2 came out?)

You can clock the shit out of a G0 Q6600 and only see like a 5% increase in gaming framerates over a box stock retail clocked/cooled CPU. Level load times go to nothing with the game on a ramdisk. Those annoying hangs while you wait for an un-cached texture to load probably go away as well. I think I'll enjoy the shorter load times more than I'll enjoy the 10-15 FPS.

Encoding is a little more CPU-bound but the maybe 4-500 Mhz additional OC I'll get from phase cooling gets me what? Maybe 3-4 minutes off a DVD recode. Hell, if I'm encoding off of HDD, I may get a better bump from the Ramdisk I/O than I'll get from the CPU OC.

...Like I said, I'm a little conflicted here. Mostly because I know so little about what a ramdisk will do for system performance... I'm tempted to get one just so I can figure out if I made the wrong choice. ;)
 
Isn't the HyperDrive 4 like $2400 USD (memory not included)? How about waiting for Mtron's $650 consumer 32GB SSD that they just announed. Won't be quite as fast as DRAM (100read/80write), sure, but it's the same max capacity and will still blow hard drives out of the water in terms of reads. link. There's lots of places you could spend the $2000 you'd save. If I were willing to spend that much, I'd get two: one for games and one for OS/apps.
 
Personally, I'd go with the HyperDrive if I had the money.

BTW, the consumer level MTRON drives are out now. I was looking at them last night when I got sick of Oblivion's streaming hiccups. They want $499 for the 16GB, and $749 for the 32GB drive. You can pick them up at dvnation.com. They also carry the HyperDrive and a faster SSD than the MTRON.
 
Personally, I'd go with the HyperDrive if I had the money.

BTW, the consumer level MTRON drives are out now. I was looking at them last night when I got sick of Oblivion's streaming hiccups. They want $499 for the 16GB, and $749 for the 32GB drive. You can pick them up at dvnation.com. They also carry the HyperDrive and a faster SSD than the MTRON.
If I won the lottery and money was no object at all I might go with the HyperDrive but since the OP says he doesn't have enough for both the hyperdrive and the chiller, the MTRON SSDs might give him something not so far from what he was looking for for a LOT less money. He might even be able to get both.

The Hyperdrive 4 loaded with 16GB from that site is $4998. That gives 125MB/s according to the site, and that Tom's Harware review indicates similar results on HD Tach.

The MTRON SSD is 16GB for $500, with almost 100MB/s reads. The flash SSD will be crippled by random writes, of course, but considering use in a gaming machine random writes probably won't be a huge issue anyway. I'd much rather RAID0 two of these SSDs for $1000, giving a good 180MB/s, which is already 'better' for reads than the Hyperdrive.

Aside from even lower access times and better non-sequential writes, what does the Hyperdrive really offer that's worth another $4000?
 
If I won the lottery and money was no object at all I might go with the HyperDrive but since the OP says he doesn't have enough for both the hyperdrive and the chiller, the MTRON SSDs might give him something not so far from what he was looking for for a LOT less money. He might even be able to get both.

The Hyperdrive 4 loaded with 16GB from that site is $4998. That gives 125MB/s according to the site, and that Tom's Harware review indicates similar results on HD Tach.

The MTRON SSD is 16GB for $500, with almost 100MB/s reads. The flash SSD will be crippled by random writes, of course, but considering use in a gaming machine random writes probably won't be a huge issue anyway. I'd much rather RAID0 two of these SSDs for $1000, giving a good 180MB/s, which is already 'better' for reads than the Hyperdrive.

Aside from even lower access times and better non-sequential writes, what does the Hyperdrive really offer that's worth another $4000?


I don't know where you see that price. a 3.5" MTRON drive (64gb) is $2,000.
 
I don't know where you see that price. a 3.5" MTRON drive (64gb) is $2,000.
Here's the 16GB Mtron for $500 The 32GB is for $750, they don't list a 64GB 'consumer' version though.
I hope more companies follow suit with cheaper consumer-targeted SSDs so there can be a bit of competition. If the prices can drop another 30% by next Christmas I might have to try them out :D
 
I just hope larger vendors jumps in like WD, Seagate, etc.
 
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