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The "HyperDrive III" - Hard Disk Made Out Of DRAM

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pookie69

Senior member
HyperDrive III

I came across this interesting piece of hardware the other day and wanted to know what people thought about it.

The actual HyperDrive III device itself costs ~£400, and then you have to buy the DIMMs, up to 16GBs worth, yourself >>> so thats gonna total quite an expense.

How fast would a hard disk made outta DRAM really be? Could you not hit the same performance from RAIDing say 4 RAPTORS together? The HyperDrive III has only an ATA133 interface afterall.

Anyways, i was just intrigued by this and wondered what others thought, who know loads more about these kinda things than me.

🙂
 
No, you couldn't get the same performance using regular IDE hard disks.
An average hard disk has an access time of something like 8-12ms. A RAM-based drive would have an access time hundreds of times faster.
While you may be able to hit very high sustained transfer rates using hard disks, you'll never match a RAM-based drive when you start using it for real-world tasks. Ever launched a program that's cached in RAM? Notice how much faster it is than launching it from a hard disk?
 
I would do that one over a raptor anyday! If I had the money I would definately buy that one to my future rig.. *drools*
 
Solid State disks are not a new idea, but have always been heinously expensive and hence our dependance on rotational magnetics (hard drives).
 
A good peek into the future, but it will be quite a few years before something like this becomes pratical.
 
they're also volatile, aren't they? they need to be continuously fed power to store the data.

i could see HDDs in the future being made out of something like flash memory - or something non-mechanical and non-volatile. but i'm sure we won't see this type of stuff mainstream for another 10 years...
 
wow, $700 for a drive that makes the raptors look like 5 1/4 floppy disks....i would actually postpone the x800xt/6800u for this...

oh yeah, forgot about the extra memory 🙁
 
These aren't designed for OS or applications. It makes sense to store a database on this where as many i/o's as possible can be requested. This makes for some fast searches and lookups.

As always, one has to pay for speed. At least in computers it isn't dangerous. 🙂

Cheers!
 
Originally posted by: Carbonadium4
16 gb isn't really enough

16 x4 (raid 5) = 50 gigs, at least you can install some of your favorite apps on the same drive.
Click to expand...

I would have thought that 16GB is more than ample for something liek windows XP plus a few choice games/apps >>> imagine FARCRY running off one of these >>> no more annoying 5min waits inbetween levels. 🙂
 
I wonder what benefit would be seen, if any, for using a small one 1-2GB for Windows XP VM or a PhotoShop scratch disk?

-Keith
 
they're fast, even the old style ram disk built in system memory was very fast. problem isn't whether it works or not, problem is affording one big enough to be useful.


a long time ago, I was a BBS admin(like I said, a LONG time ago), using VBBS.

Anyways, the machine was a 486 dx2/50 I believe, and I had it setup to create a ram disk at bootup, and copy all of the BBS working files to the ramdisk. Made for a very fast BBS, lol, just had to periodically backup the ram disk to the hard drive.
 
Rushmore i think had a battery backup, well, "Battery" that would keep the memory state charged so there would be no loss.
 
Originally posted by: eastvillager
they're fast, even the old style ram disk built in system memory was very fast. problem isn't whether it works or not, problem is affording one big enough to be useful.


a long time ago, I was a BBS admin(like I said, a LONG time ago), using VBBS.

Anyways, the machine was a 486 dx2/50 I believe, and I had it setup to create a ram disk at bootup, and copy all of the BBS working files to the ramdisk. Made for a very fast BBS, lol, just had to periodically backup the ram disk to the hard drive.
Click to expand...

I used telegard 1 to 2.01 and visionx and misc others.. pcboard..

yeah I had everything zipped up into 1 720k 3.5 disk
 
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).
Click to expand...
between the UPS and the rest of it, you could survive a while without power

Autobackup/restore firmware which kicks in during any power outage to back up the HIII to the HDD.
Click to expand...
awesome
 
so could u possibly raid this thing? also, when performing raid on 2 harddrives, can u also perform raid on 2 other harddrives that are in the same system? ie. 2 raptors raided and 2 7200rpm drives raided?
 
Originally posted by: Mik3y
so could u possibly raid this thing? also, when performing raid on 2 harddrives, can u also perform raid on 2 other harddrives that are in the same system? ie. 2 raptors raided and 2 7200rpm drives raided?
Click to expand...

Seriously... why the heck would you want to raid something like this? One is expensive enough to setup... remember the initial £400 they are asking for is JUST for the unit itself - you have to buy the memory - it supports up to 8 x 2GB DIMMs >>> MEGA cost.

I dont think its practical to expect to use something like this in place of a HDD but rather just for 'specialist' use >>> like for sticking your OS on and a few choice prgs that swap to the disk a lot or games like FARCRY that take years to load.

And to your RAID Q... yes. You can have more than one RAID array setup in a single system.
 
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