Hyperdrive4 "solid state" drive...

DO WANT!

I'm prone to drive failure, (I mean, honestly, i've lost about 2 drives a year for the last 4 years or so...)

And I doubt this costs as much as they're selling it for- come on!


I need someone to make one of these for a laptop (smaller, with a SATA connection.) then i'd be happy as larry!

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm#hyperosHDIIproduct



[edit] For what it is, i think I'll just get one of these:

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2431&p=5

Am I reading it correctly, that this is a $2325 16Gb ram drive?

That must be a joke.

How long till a 500Gb drive?

The new azus eeepc will have 4GB to 32GB solid state drives and the range is gonna start at $199! so this company are taking the piss. In fact, all companies selling these things seem to be charging more than you would expect (when you compare the price of a 4GB usb stick)
AND you have to keep power to it at all times. Id rather see a 'memory stick ram' style harddisk.

This one looks cool tho :)
http://www.memtech.com/memtech_3.5-inch-ide-scsi-solid-state-flash-drives-products.html#memtech-at3550-wolverine-3.5-inch-ide-solid-state-flash-drive

6 hour backup. Still, it's *pricey* huh!

This one is 8GB for $869 so you could buy 2 of these for well below the price of that other one, and it uses non-volatile flash memory rather than DIMMs that need constant power.

http://www.mouser.com/search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=AT3515-8192virtualkey61010000virtualkey885-AT3515-8192

And of course there's always the gigabyte i-ram too which pretends to be a SATA drive and has been kicking around for ages now.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/83684/gigabyte-iram.html

Rob, I linked to that device in my original post- lol... (and yes, the edit was there before you posted :P)

but yes. The Iram is quite cool. I just need a 2.5" SATA equivalent to these!

Like these:
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-2p5.html

As i said though, i wouldnt want no volitile dimm version, it would have to be flash only for me, as i would be too twitchy whenever the power failed that the battery was doing its job properly :/

It may be the future. I'm pretty intertest when they are affordable but by then platter-based drives could be humongous by comparison + we all want to store more data these days e.g. MP3, AVI etc.

Bah, aren't those Holocubes(tm) in the shops yet?!

I think honestly you just need a mirror drive which basically has say 128 gig ram, and a normal hard drive attached, so when its powered on, it just dumps the physical drive stuff to the ram.

Saving would be normal hard drive speed, I think it'd work really well for access times and game loading etc, plus would not require to be powered at all times.

Hybrid stuff like this seems more practical to me. It would still cost around £2,000 for a 128 gig "solid state" drive though going by current memory prices.

Or you can hum a tune for 1 minute while your game loads off your super cheap non-car priced hard drive... and spend the rest on your Girl.

The problem with flash versions is their write times are slower than plater based equivalents. it's the read times that are faster....

NO, read and write of flash drives slower than hard drives...

Flash drives are catching up though.

Sorry, it seems i was talking of "seek" time, which of course is almost instant on flash devices.

Yeah, no seeking for memory. But current affordable hard drives are still 2 to 3 times faster than flash memory. Which is too bad.

Hyperdrive is interesting because it is designed for endurance, not for gaming like the I-RAM(no ECC) or for slow limited read/write like flashdrives.

It supports ECC, has a durable design and can autorestore from an attached drive and it works with pretty much any RAID chipset you feed it to.

If your need is for games, then the I-RAM is for you, but for serious use the Hyperdrive is king.

Solid state flash drives by Samsung are not slow. used as your system drive they blow HD's out of the water.

The real problem with flash is the limited number of writes before failure, which add up to a seriously short life if you use them as a system disc.

---------
Solid state flash drives by Samsung are not slow. used as your system drive they blow HD's out of the water.
---------

That's not what I am finding. I am seeing 32GB for $500. Which means they cost about 50 times as much as a hard disk and I am seeing 58MB/s read and 32MB/s write. Both of these speeds are slower than standard hard disks.

Can you supply a link to a Solid State disk with faster speed ratings?

Nomen: that pretty much has been resolved thanks to smart load balancing where it cycles through the various sectors to write to. Even in you continuously write data all day long, it't still going to take >5 years before you hit the max. Even then: the economical lifespan of a drive tends to be less than 5 years (most people upgrade to a faster/larger drive by then) plus people don't actually write to disk 100% of the time, so the actual life is longer.

That said, over the last few years I've lost more thumbdrives that become entirely unreadable than harddrives, so I'm not putting too much stock in the reliability of a flash drive just yet.

(I also noticed that Dell started shipping 32GB solid state drives across a bunch of their laptops, for a few hundred dollars more than a 'normal' harddrive. As far as prices are concerned, they are starting to get almost appealing now.

Constant reading/writing to a hard disk is better than using it sometimes.

I have a TiVo, it is about 8 years old. The hard drive in it is used 100% of the time. The TiVo NEVER stops recording, so it is writing to the hard disk 100% of the time. It is starting and stopping hard drives that is bad for them.

Taskmaster: I'm not disputing the sustained read/write speeds, we all know they are slower than conventional HD's (though only by about 25% in some cases). However, your system drive rarely streams large chunks of contiguous data. It spends most of its time seeking back and forth across the platters as it reads tiny files or thrashes the heads about whilst (it tries) accessing 2 or 3 files at the same time.

Most people have 1 HD in their PC. Of the people that have 2 or more, some of those still have the Windows page file on the C: drive.

Having Windows (or your other favourite OS of choice) on a solid state drive and page/swap file on conventional HD will give you an immense speed boost.

Windows boot times... and here I mean the time from power-on to having a fully usable desktop... get slashed in half (or further still, depensing on the number of startup programs you have).

I would give my left arm for a 64GB solid state drive, just for the speed increase, let alone the reliability, power consumption and noise reduction.