HyperDrive 4 Redefines Solid State Storage

shabodah

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I simply can't understand how this product is so expensive. It uses technology that is more outdated than any RAID card that has been on the market for the last year. Furthermore, It is no competing against SSD's that are nearing the 100 mb/s point, so, making the system multichanneled, and using not just the upgraded sata, but perhaps multiple sata cables would make the most sense. For far less than half the cost of this, you could run two SSD's and more than beat the performance.
 

zenmaster

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Actually SSDs are extremely slow in terms of write performance.
This actually excels in all areas of performance.

If the Drive was priced reasonable, say $200 w/o RAM, I would definitely consider it.
 

predaking

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and why does it use ddr instead of ddr2?

from a cursury look at newegg the ddr2s are half the price.

also given that you can purchase complete motherboards with ram controllers and hard drive controllers for a fraction of the price.

oh well, i really want one, but maybe next year.
 

devnull

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To hell with the Hyperdrive...it's way too expensive for anything other than the high end server market and it uses antiquated memory and interfaces.

Also, why bother having IDE? If your only choice for adding storage to your server is IDE, you're going to bottleneck a $2500 storage device.

I think Gigabyte needs to come out with a version of the iRAM that uses DDR2 SODIMMS. If it had 8 DDR2 SODIMM slots and SATAII for ~$200 I think it could actually sell. In it's current form it's useless with 1GB modules and 2GB modules are too expensive. Decent 2GB DDR modules start at $120 right now. You can get name brand 2GB DDR2 SODIMMs for $60.
 

shabodah

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http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9537

Those SSD's will be available at or around the same time this product is and at significantly less cost.

I'll take two 100 mb/s SSD's over one 115 mb/s overpriced and over complicated as well as outdated drive like that.
 

dawgma

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Well that settles it. I won't even consider building a new system until a solid state drive like that is released. And when it does come out, I will build the new system around a few of those drives. Do you really think it's possible they will be available as early as Q1 2008?
 

Runelord

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Not all SSD's are the same; we're seeing a new class of enterprise SSD's that are just now starting to emerge and their not relying on 20+-year-old protocols and HDD controllers that were designed for slow mechanical assemblies.

For example:

Link to Tom's review of a new class of high performance SSD technology designed for the enterprise

It may take some time before we see them in every workstation, but SSD's will definitely affect the way datacenters are architected in the very near future.


 

ricstorms

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If you want the speed of running a OS out of RAM, check out Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux. The OS loads entirely in RAM and it is ridiculously fast. I think the longest I've had to wait for a program to load is 3 seconds, and Im using an old Dell Precision with a P3! Its free to check out, just download the live CD.
 


DELETED this article is about replacing slow mechanical harddrives for a faster storage medium.
 

shabodah

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idiot... this article is about replacing slow mechanical harddrives for a faster storage medium.

That might be the focus of the article, but I agree it is a different means to the same ends. If the OS we were all using wasn't as bloated as all heck, the 4GB's of Ram that most enthusiasts have would be enough for the vast majority of applications. Of course, that would require the programmers to actually program instead of copying and pasting.....
 

singingigo

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The reason these drives are so expensive is because of the power requirements. To those who talke about performance, did you even look at the benckmarks? The I/O numbers are out of this world. Those are numbers comparable to a $25000 SAN. And you can get it for $3000! Incredible. This is not for workstations or gamers. This is for IT professionals.
 

thomaslompton

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What about Fusion IO? Why did they not put that in the comparison? It is way faster than the other SSDs that they used. http://www.fusionio.com/
 

Runelord

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I would guess it's because FusionIO isn't shipping until January so they probably haven't released test boards yet, but I've seen the board at DEMO and it is crazy fast.






 

ewart

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re consumer/desktop market

IMHO few enthusiasts have $3,270 (8gb model) or $4,540 (16gb) let alone $8400 (32gb) to spend on such a product. That crowd will have to struggle by with 8gb of DDR2 main memory and a ramdrive software for $600, for now. At least the DDR2 has resale value for such frequent upgrades, when a affordably priced fast storage solution arrives for this market.

despite obvious unsuitability for all but a very small subsegment of this market, interestingly the manufacturer website marketing material is significantly orientated towards the consumer market, although it is fun to see people comparing $99 raptor drives with the product.

re: enterprise market

this product delivers the sort of performance this market loves and the marginal price of the unit without ram $2,500 is not "huge". It's the sort of performance that makes you want to consolidate your entire data centre onto the drive, unfortunately my data centre has more than 32gb of data otherwise this would be truly excellent.

Consider two scenarios. First, a server with less than 32gb of data - perhaps a webserver, or small database/exchange server.

- In this scenario for most cases I would put 8, 16 or 32gb of ram directly into the server and let the web, exchange or database server cache what is necessary. Servers are left on 24/7 so I'm not concerned about initial reads; writes would definitely be slower although reads which typically form the bulk of all activity are not limited by a very, very slow Ultra ATA or SATA interface.

In the second scenario my server has more than 32gb of data - perhaps a very large webserver or moderate+ exchange/database server with 200gb of data.

- This scenario is more likely to attract my attention if I have an amazingly huge I/O requirement; or perhaps if I am consolidating a number of smaller databases into one server, which significantly lowers TCO administration wise. Assuming you could physically fit the components into a server, 7 x 32gb hyperdrives ($58,800, 224gb) would be tasty and the option certainly opens up new possibilities.

Of course, for $58,000 I could get quite a nice SCSI SAS system, or use MTRON's flash disks 120/90 mb/s read/write ($1500 for 32gb version). The 2.5" and 3.5" form factor means I could easily slot 7 ($10,500) or even 15 ($22,500) of these into my raid bays for perhaps 600-800mb/s and 1300-1700mb/s depending on whether the RAID controller is good enough.

The real question is in practical terms - whether that sort of I/O performance is enough; most of the operations I consult to are on SCSI/SAS now so - yes, although demands are growing. roll on David's team with the fusionIO drive, David feel free to send me a free sample of your new 800mb/s flash drive due in 2008. actually, send me two and I'll raid them :)

signed, sick of bad I/O
 

Darkk

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One of the things I was thinking about for months is adding ram based disk storage in hardware to replace the HD in my IPCop router. I know there is a thing called RAMCop that copies the stuff into memory but it's one add-on doesn't always work right due to the mods I made to the OS. This will give me a solid state router with no moving parts except for one fan.

 

annihilator-x-

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Well slot 3 and slot 4 of the card only supports CF type 1. CF type 1 cards are quite rare and the maximum capacity of type 1 card is only ay 4GB. That means you can't do 4*16GB on it.
 

rbarone69

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Ahhh I understand; thanks for pointing that out!

It would be nice to have some sort of raid card that would support multiple 16gb cards brining the price down for a solid state solution.

Would you know of a high performance CF->SATA device that would use a proper write algorithum that would work inline with SATA? Then a SATA on-board raid controller would manage the multiple cards.

Just trying to think of alternate soltions that would allow me to not hear my disks thrash all the time (especially with Vista).