Hyperdrive -DRAM based hard drive -superfast!

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/0704...D3techspec.htm

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/0704...mg/HD3zoom.gif
^good picture here

The HyperDrive III is quite simply a Hard Disk made out of DRAM. It therefore connects and performs like an impossibly fast Hard Disk. Here are the technical specs:

CDROM drive form factor. Fits into a standard 5.25" CD bay.

Connects just like a Hard Disk or a CDROM.

PATA(IDE) or SATA

Unlike the HyperDrive II which only took on board RAM. The HyperDirve III provides 8 DIMM slots, each of which can take DIMMs up to 2GB in capacity (no on board RAM). So max capacity is now 16GB.

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.

Integral 160 minute 7.2v battery back up to cover electricity board power outages (1250 milliamp hours - on board trickle charge unit takes 48 hours to fully charge).

thinking about getting one..

you've gotta buy the ram seperate i think..

would be perfect for nlited xp, on 2gb of ram.. -can ghost back to it in no time if you did lose power and lose the o/s

http://bleddyn.co.uk/forums/hyperdrive.png

here's the stats, i tidied them up!!

Yeah but £400. It must be where the future lies i know. £400 tho. :eek:

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

or send me one and i'll review it :rockon:


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

Yeah, but doesn't the gigabyte i-RAM beat it both for price and performance?

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Originally Posted by kalniel

Yeah, but doesn't the gigabyte i-RAM beat it both for price and performance?

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http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/..._on_the_block/

S.

hmm, will get the iram instead :)

but where can it be bought ?

iram that is hehe :)

http://www.fastekcomputers.co.uk/sho...isk-p-298.html

PLEASE NOTE PRE ORDER ONLY ETA .. EARLY JAN 06

could get two of them and create a raid array!

..... they are so going to be expensive.... 4x1g sticks are already £240 not inc of these iram boards..

When u blow ur psu when ur off to a week vacation in asia.. there goes ur OS..

thasts so cool lol i want one but they must be so expensive not only do u need the drive but u need the ram for it to :S

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Originally Posted by sawyen

..... they are so going to be expensive.... 4x1g sticks are already £240 not inc of these iram boards..

When u blow ur psu when ur off to a week vacation in asia.. there goes ur OS..

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you'd need 2gb max for XP

1gb would be ample if you used an nlited xp


as for loosing everything? -ghost. takes about a minute to restore on this

*drool*.. wow, thats just.. wow.
Imagine how useful that would be to gamers who whine about 3 second loading times of modern games?.. Not a practical device, but definatly desireable if you have the wallet to pay for it.

2gb wont get you very far with xp, if you have reason to buy the iram then you are an enthusiast/power user and will have demanding games and apps

if you want your programs sped up aswell you will need them installed on the iram too so your wanting atleast 4 gb i reckon

my plan is 2 i rams and 2 2gb dimms and raid them , then i can add a couple of 2gb dimms each month till i have filled it up for a total of 16 gb!

bear in mind we have windows vista coming soon and thats going to be bloated !never mind all the apps and games that get bigger all the time

on the contrary, this might work superly fast as a processing station drive for my mass spec data and AnalystQS... but 16GB will be gone after 2 sets of data.

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Originally Posted by weebroonieuk

2gb wont get you very far with xp

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my xp install is under 450mb

www.nliteos.com

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 ....

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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Originally Posted by bledd

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

or send me one and i'll review it :rockon:


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

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

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

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

:( 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)

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.

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Originally Posted by dangerous_dom

Boot times would be awesome, near instant.

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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? :p

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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My 10krpm drives have larger platters, well higher platter densisity. Which 10krpm scsi's are exactly the same as them? I had a quick google but couldn't turn up any!

As for linux? Sir, i know how to use linux, having written my own device driver, and played with it on embedded sticks, my hatred dosen't come from a lack of knowledge, i just prefer BSD and with modern CPU speeds can't see a need for linux as BSD is better.

Butcher, i'm guessing its because its not really a SATA device, its most likely been limited by the speed of the interface controller. I'd GUESS that its just a ata interface, with a sata convertor stuck on the front, as this would be easy to design and quite cheap for low production quantity.

Raptors are indeed scsi with a SATA interface.

Have a look at scans scsi disks sometime and note the similar capacities to the raptor. And a 5 yr warrenty is pretty good.

That said, the real advantages of RAM drives are power, noise and heat - or the reduction thereof.

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Originally Posted by TheAnimus

As for linux? Sir, i know how to use linux, having written my own device driver...

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Really?.. Which one?.. I could take a quick look in my kernel sources.

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Originally Posted by TheAnimus

...i just prefer BSD and with modern CPU speeds can't see a need for linux as BSD is better.

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Better acording to whom? and in what context? and what proof do you bear this claim?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheAnimus

Butcher, i'm guessing its because its not really a SATA device, its most likely been limited by the speed of the interface controller. I'd GUESS that its just a ata interface, with a sata convertor stuck on the front, as this would be easy to design and quite cheap for low production quantity.

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The HyperDrive only uses an ATA100 interface, more than likely they include an ATA->SATA adopter to claim SATA compatiablity. The iMax has a real SATA I interface though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kalniel

Raptors are indeed scsi with a SATA interface.

Have a look at scans scsi disks sometime and note the similar capacities to the raptor. And a 5 yr warrenty is pretty good.

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http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...Thumbnails=yes can't see any with the same platter size there, which brand are they under? Its defo not seagate or maxtor, or fujitsu.

That said, the real advantages of RAM drives are power, noise and heat - or the reduction thereof.[/QUOTE]No moving parts too, should mean less failure.

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

Really?.. Which one?.. I could take a quick look in my kernel sources.
Better acording to whom? and in what context? and what proof do you bear this claim?

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its a ISA driver to bang data to an Atmega, i never used it again because i was been paid to write it, so its not my source to share (sorry but when you've got 8k in debt, 12k by hte end of this academic year, i find it hard to be anything but capitalist). But if you've any questions feal free to start a thread and i'll do my best to help. But its not a nice experiance as they have no concept of a HAL (hardware abstraction layer) at play.

CPU speed, threading speed, this is complicated, now all of this is from an x86 perspective, but you have the context registers which have a bitmap which limits what you can access from different rings (0,1,2,3) 0 been unrestricted, 3 been most restricted. Now linux isn't as mean as BSD or NT in enforcing certain rules with these registers (the big question been how does one call an API? NT uses interupt 2e, which has a vector set to look at a table and bing your in kernel mode (ring 0, from ring 3). BSD and linux are slightly different, if you look at an assembly programming guide, you will see Hello World is more complex in BSD. This is the only way BSD is slower. And on a slow CPU doing simple things (one proccess taking most teh time) you will see linux to be faster.)

But when it comes to shunting these processes around, linux is really playing catch up, pre-emptive multithreading (something so simple i wrote it on a PIC18, which is a very limited uC by todays standards, gits at uni wouldn't let me have one of the nice Ti DSPs, 500mhz... gits..) has only just been added in 2.6. The defense of it was that it dosen't provide much of a performance boost?! Bollocks dosen't it. This is a simple example of the systematic denail of anything linux dosen't have thats advantagous. I'm not saying linux is bad as such, there are some things it does well, but for a desktop, or a server thats serving lots of things. Its just not what its good at.

Now how does this effect the RAID i hear you cry, simple. When you have a file request, what must happen? If you have a kernel debugger installed, i'd recomend stepping over the proccess as it will explain it much better than my dislexic ramblings. Then do the same with BSD. Stepping over with a debugger is my prefered way of learning about functions, its just you have to learn what to step over so don't be thinking you won't crash ur computer a bit!

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Originally Posted by TheAnimus

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...Thumbnails=yes can't see any with the same platter size there, which brand are they under? Its defo not seagate or maxtor, or fujitsu.

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WD raptor 36gb - 2 heads 1 platter (=36gb platter)

Seagate 10k 68pin 36gb - 1 platter (=36gb platter)

All other 36gb scsi drives I am assuming to be 36gb platters too.

WD raptor 74gb = 4 heads 2 platters - they have just doubled up the 36gb model.

Maxtor Atlas 10 IV 73.5gb = two 36gb platters

More recent 73/73.5 scsi's have not (the altas V for eg.), they have 1 platter. But it doesn't change the fact that the raptor is based on two 36gb platter scsi technology.

the bearings and actuator are classic scsi design as well.

not disputing any similarities in aproach, as there is little that different in a conceptual way between most HDDs (except horizontal vrs vertical bits).

The TPI of a WD raptor is 95 apprently, New ones are going to be 100.

All of seagate's are 105, ergo the platters are different size (think physical mm size).

QED.

All i am saying its its not a SCSI drive underneeth, its not built by someone who's been making ultra reliable bits of kit for years. I'm not disputing the cost benefit for most people, its just I got all mine second hand without much problem at all. Heck the 15krpm ones in my main rig, got all 5 for < &#163;120 inc vat P&P just by watching ebay. All got warrenty, a low level format + verify + redundancy with RAID is all thats needed.

For more on HDD in depth:
http://www.lostcircuits.com/hdd/hdd2/3.shtml

Actually the raptor is a 40gb platter with the last 4 gb lopped off. This is what explains the high xfer rate at the low end of the drive.

Nox