Hyperdrive -DRAM based hard drive -superfast!

[bledd]

2gb wont get you very far with xp

my xp install is under 450mb

www.nliteos.com

[weebroonieuk]

im well aware of nlite ive been using it since the early versions im typng on my nlited laptop , infact every single time i install xp its been nlited and automated and ive slipstreamed sp2 and the slipstreamed all the updates and hotfixes and remove all the drivers basically and add in the latest ones ive downloaded from my hardware vendors site

but i need to install alot of apps and theres no point getting a ram drive and not being able to fit your os your apps and your swap file on it ....

[bledd]

set %programfiles% to D: drive, or whatever you want your current hard drive to be, and maybe put one or two apps on the hyperdrive/iram like photoshop or your CS or something

[aidanjt]

Having program logic on hard drive isn't that big a deal, most actual binaries take less than half a second to throw into RAM, the main delay with software is the time it takes to initalise variables and load additional data.. I'd put the swap file onto one of those things, and anything data related if possable.. a device like this would be more suited to *NIX type OSes, where you could mount /var to this device.. Just another annoying thing about Windows.. Oh well

[autopilot]

I have read about these a few times in PC mags. Other companies are developing them as we speak, with one company (Hitachi?) talking about a 100gig flash based HDD drive already! Sure they are a while away and will be expensive at first, but demand and increasing production levels will reduce the price. Apparently, if you started making 1,000,000 flash drives and 1,000,000 equal capasity standard harddrives right from scratch, the flash drives would be cheaper. It's only the standard HDD's are such an established item.

I agree that the future is these in tandom with regular harddrives, so yeah one for OS and apps (and some data) and one for data. Also, making them failsafe it not really that hard. Periodic ghosting (or syncing just the changed files only with the back up), in the background, when the system is idle or during shut down can easily be done. Battery backup (flash does not need much power) can also be used in case of total power loss. Boot times would be awesome, near instant.

Vista will have simular flashdrive support built in from day one, so it's coming. If you plug a USB flash drive in, Vista can use this and increase system perfomance.

[autopilot]

The other thing of course would be being able to create the first truely silent PC, as the HDD is the only moving mechanical thing in as PC you have to have. (although i guess you would still need an optical drive every now and again). They would be great in laptops too, maybe even helping power consumption and battery life?

[weebroonieuk]

there not talking about entire flash drives there talking about hybrid drives as in a traditional drive with a portion of flash to help with common files, like a really big cache so the drive can spin down and use only its flash for the majority of its work they will be introduced for laptops first

i would love to know how plugging in a usb flash drive will boost system performance?

say we had an nforce 4 board and fitted all usb headers that means we could have upto 10 flash drives poking out of our pc

i can only begin to imagine the blistering speed that usb flash drives and there astronomical transfer rates bring to my pc's performance ......


as for setting up different files and portions of an os to go on a ram drive, id rather plonk the full thing on a ramdrive and not have to care and knowing that everything that i need will be going as fast as the sata bus will let it and i can save all the data to a couple of raptors in raid0

[aidanjt]

USB does carry a CPU overhead though. I'm not sure if solid state will ever take the full job of hard drives, its just much easier to play with polarity of matter than continually squeezing transisters down to stupidly small sizes.

[TheAnimus]

any chance of you guys trying to get your hands on one for a review?

or send me one and i'll review it


going to buy 2more raptor 74's (4 total) and run them in raid 1+0, then get this with 2gb for windows and photoshop

RAID-5 it, 1 parity, 3 stripes. But then again these are raptors so only 25% redundancy might not be enough.

[aidanjt]

Raptors have a longer lifespan than 7,200RPM disks.

[bledd]

might just keep them in raid0 and robocopy any data i need to my server

[TheAnimus]

oh dear.

I'm sure they have a longer life span than SOME 7.2krpm disks, but i garantee you that i've got 5 in service for a friend (i look after his hardware because i'm closer to london and i get free bandwidth). They are SCSI, and have 7 year warenty, a much much lower failure rate (MTBF on spec sheets).

Raptors drop like flies, ask anyone who works in returns, look at the raiting on ebuyer for instance. I know 4 people at uni who've had em die (thou i think 1 was just trying it as an excuse). How long is the warenty? Last time i had my mits on one, it was only 3 years, seagate are giving 5 accross their entire non-enterprise range. (but they argue that their HDDs are used by enterprise people in un-important machines).

You want a reliable HDD, get a 7.2krpm SCSI drive, try and find one without a 7 year warenty its quite hard as most manifacturers i know give them as standard. Heck even my 15krpm's all have 7 year, and most of them are second hand (except the maxtor, they only give 5 year on their 15krpm drives)

[aidanjt]

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=65
5 year warrenty.. You're forgetting the Raptors are using SCSI mechanical parts with a cheaper SATA interface controller. The interface is the only difference between them and SCSI disks in 10,000RPM catagory. I have two and I've had them for a year, and I havn't given them much resting time, still havn't died on me.

I don't have anything against SCSI, in fact if I had more money than sense I'd use it on every machine in this house. SCSI is very mature, and pretty much perfect for demanding disk I/O, but that doesn't change the fact that it costs a small fortune.

I just wish you'd stop blabbing unsubstantiated nonsense all the time, back in real world (tm) people buy SATA products because its a good ballance of price/performance, and Linux actually doesn't suck when you know how to use it.

[Butcher]

Boot times would be awesome, near instant.

Dream on. Boot times would be limited by CPU speed. It's unlikely you'd do better than half the time of a decent HDD.

Also was it just me who thought that a stupidly expensive RAM based disk having a max transfer rate of 74MB/s (below a decent 15k rpm disk) was pants?

[aidanjt]

I know, using ATA100 as the interface was just plain stupid, SATA II is common on new computers, and even if the host was SATA I the drive would still work with it using SATA II.

[Butcher]

Also on boot times: Tom's hardware saw a 2 second decrease in windows boot over a raptor, from 19.5s to 17.5s with both iram and hyperdrive. Don't expect massive boot time speed increases.