Solid State Disk, not too bad of a price

Copper · Post by **Copper** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 6:02 pm

Well, considering the performance & silence anyway. HyperOS, a European company, is selling a disk called the HyperDrive III that can be loaded with up to 16GB of RAM, is bootable, and uses an ATA100 interface. It has transfer speeds up to 95 MB per second and lightning fast access times. It costs $700.00 without any RAM chips, you have to supply your own.

I can drool!!

http://www.hyperos2002.com/?affid=19129

The photo is of the old HyperDrive II that used embedded SDRAM and had an ATA33 interface.

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 9:07 pm

16GB of RAM adds up quickly. Especially since they're estimating w/ 2GB RAM modules. This could cost you well over $4000USD for the full 16GB, since 2GB modules are about $500USD for DDR RAM

Copper · Post by **Copper** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 6:15 am

True. But two or three GB wouldn't cost that much and would be enough to run XP and some apps. More than I can spend on a drive, but not that far off from today's top of the line SCSI drives.

Post by **Rusty075** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 6:53 am

For pricing, the sweet spot for DDR sticks is at the 1gig level. You could populate that with 8 1gig sticks for less than $800. For a boot drive, that would be plenty.

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 7:10 am

Rusty075 wrote:For pricing, the sweet spot for DDR sticks is at the 1gig level. You could populate that with 8 1gig sticks for less than $800. For a boot drive, that would be plenty.

That's still $1500 for a boot drive. Plus, the offline storage scares me (4-hour backup-battery). So if you've lost power for more than 4-hours. Poof! There goes your installation.

POLIST8 · Post by **POLIST8** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 7:22 am

Yeah, cheap for Hugh Hefner.

Project · Post by **Project** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 7:56 am

u can always buy a ups for it or something

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 7:58 am

sthayashi wrote:So if you've lost power for more than 4-hours. Poof! There goes your installation.

Four hours is more then enough time to make a back-up to someplace safe. If you can afford this type of harddrive, then you should have enough money to put your PC's and network equipment on a UPS. Besides power outages of more then 4 ours occur seldom. (At least where I live.)

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 9:21 am

You can connect a dedicated hard disk to it for automatic non-volatile backup. Not sure how this works, there are more details in a thread over at StorageReview.com. Haven't got time to dig up a link right now.

Post by **Rusty075** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 12:18 pm

Yeah sthayashi, make no mistake, this sort of thing is only for people who are willing to pay 1000% more in price to get %10 more performance. Clearly not for everyone.

The real target audience for these things are probably servers, where the latency times for retreaving little random files off HDD's is a significant performance factor. Servers also have the benefit of being always-on, and with UPS backups.

For desktop PC's I doubt you would really see any performance gain besides at boot-up and when loading a big app.

tragus · Post by **tragus** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 2:32 pm

Rusty075 wrote:For desktop PC's I doubt you would really see any performance gain besides at boot-up and when loading a big app.

Perhaps, but I would love to see a review with some real-world decriptions. If your system ends up swapping, or needs to dynamically load files during operation, etc., there could be a substantial win. Come to think of it, what *are* the current bottlenecks in today's system usages?

I really like the potential silence, and have been drooling ever since KatanaMan showed us his solid-state drives. $1500 is a lot of Somolians for an 8 GB drive (with battery backup), but it's getting closer to reasonable for high-end applications. If the hard drive back up were normally powered down, but turned on during external power failure for the supposed automatic backup, the silence would also be secure.

Mind you, I'm rapidly filling up 160 GB drives and a colleague is running a multiple terabyte lab. Yikes!

Post by **Rusty075** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 3:55 pm

I imagine that few current users have read this, since it is fairly old, so I'll just bring it to everyone's attention:

MikeC's review of the Cenatek Rocket Drive It's PCI, instead of IDE, and SDRAM, instead of DDR, but the performance spec's are about the same.

lenny · Post by **lenny** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 10:14 pm

tragus wrote:Come to think of it, what *are* the current bottlenecks in today's system usages?

Erm, the user?

Actually there's no simple answer to that. It all depends on what you're doing. But if you're referring to normal word processing / e-mail / web browsing, then I'll say it's definitely the user followed by network bandwidth for web browsing.

Post by **Rusty075** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 10:55 pm

I'll agree with lenny. From personal experience with people who considering making a huge upgrade for a machine that they only surf and email on, going from dial-up to cable ISP was all the upgrade they needed to make the machine feel 10 times more responsive.

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 11:22 pm

Eh, for me, it's boot times and program load times that are annoying. Since I'm trying to conserve power, I turn my machine off when I'm asleep and when I've gone to work.

Splinter · Post by **Splinter** » Sat Jul 17, 2004 11:16 am

Boot time for me is 56 seconds from cold to fully responsive. That's loading MBM5, MSN Messanger and Norton on bootup.

I have massive problems with HD bottlenecks playing games with lots of high resolution textures. It's contstantly swapping to the page file. Huge performance losses.

However, I don't see the point in putting a $4000 ultra-high-speed storage medium on an ATA100 connection! It'd be like trying to drive a McLaren F1 through downtown LA. It would have to be SATA or SCSI to get any real performance out of it.

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Tue Jul 20, 2004 9:28 am

Splinter wrote:[...]It's contstantly swapping to the page file. Huge performance losses.

However, I don't see the point in putting a $4000 ultra-high-speed storage medium on an ATA100 connection! [...] It would have to be SATA or SCSI to get any real performance out of it.

If you're constantly swapping, you need more RAM, not a faster HDD.

Also, the major benefit of this isn't STR (though that's pretty good and set to improve), but access time. You won't be using this to store large amounts of STR sensitive data, you'll be using this for instant access to small but frequently used files, like the page file, programs and Windows, or databases with thousands of simultaneous accesses.
Or something.

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Sun Jul 25, 2004 3:49 am

Spod wrote: If you're constantly swapping, you need more RAM, not a faster HDD.
Or something.

Actually, it's ridiculous how often software will assume, for some stupid reason, that you're letting Windows handle your page file, try to load gigs of stuff into RAM, and then crash when it finds out the hard way that it's not allowed to. More convenient for it to just pretend the entire install dir is in RAM or something, I don't know. I remember BF1942 being pretty bad for this (would happily use ~1300MB of RAM + swap) and Planetside is probably the worst ever (happily loads crap and leaks until it goes through 2GB of ram + swap)... lots of other offenders but I remember these two as the most egregious. Still cheaper (and much better performance) to simply use bigger DIMMs though, unless one already had 2gb+ RAM and planned on filling this thing with at least 8gb to make it cost effective.

edit: you sorta had the same idea, even though you argued against it, didn't see first time.

having a ton of RAM and using an SSD for paging and temp files/cache anyways would be neat.

jamoore9 · Post by **jamoore9** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 9:04 am

This is still SilentPCReview.com, right? Nobody's mentioning the fact that this would be completely silent. No moving parts whatsoever. Performance-wise (talking about OS and light productivity usage, not gaming, video, sound, or other "heavy uses"), this would be equivalent to having a 3+ disk Raid-0 array in another room. It would be wicked fast and 100% non-instrusive.

Unfortunately its a really stupid idea for silencing. The downsides are just too huge. You'd have to have at least 2 of these at 16GB to even rival a single SCSI drive or Raid-0 array for storage capacity. And even then, that's not a lot of space by modern standards. After XP and a productivity suite, you've got room for what, Photoshop and 1 game? Then there's the heat generated by the 10+ DIMMs (with only one SSD) that now live in your box, 8 of which are ALWAYS on.

And if its just a boot drive, then there's no point (at least not at SPCR), since you'd still have that noisy mechanical drive in there for anything other than booting. Without the HDD, your PC is a $5,000 "internet appliance." This wouldn't even make for a good media-PC file server...

Solid state will be pretty cool for silent computing when they finally make it a workable technology. If each of these, with DIMMs, was $100, then it might be tempting...

melechmet · Post by **melechmet** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 8:00 am

Anyone considering RAID for these (Stripping in specific), and perhaps copyiing the RAID Image on a server, for quick Restore if a failure occurs ? Ram is relatively cheap- 2 or four of these drives (32/64GB) of these drives would be an extreme and silent option. Wish they came in SATA.

mpteach · Post by **mpteach** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 10:58 am

Rusty075 wrote: Servers also have the benefit of being always-on, and with UPS backups.

The UPS and triple redundancy generators will keep the ramdrives external PS going so there woudlnt be data loss ever. Though frequent backkups are alway recommended.

You would think that would solve all problems wouldnt you, Well severs arent always-on. About 6 months ago the PSU died in my website server. The area where the datacenter was locate was hit by a montster storm or hurricane and there was flooding. The storm hit thursday and most of the techs were sent home? With the storm and the weekend my server had a downtime of 5 days.