Solid state drives?

Ha-ha...I actually got that joke!

 

I'm still waiting on MRAM or whatever descendant of that tech actually comes to production.

 

I want one of these : £225




The SATA2 DDR2 HyperDrive5 features...

>Read and write access time in microseconds.
>Sustained Read Rate of 175 MB/s.
>Sustained Write Rate of 145MB/s.
>WD740ADFD Raptor manages 77 MB/S.
>It is a Bootable SATA2 Disk.
>It connects just like a Hard Disk or CDROM.
>CDROM drive form factor, fits into a 5.25" CD bay.
>It does not require any drivers.
>Silent Solid State technology.
>Takes 8 DDR2 Kingston ValueRAM memory sticks.
>Up to 8GB per stick making 64GB Max capacity.
>External power adapter keeps data when PC is off.
>Battery backup to keep data in a power cut.
>Start with 2GB and build up to 16/32/64GB.
>Formats Instantly
>Never needs to be defragged. It's Random Access!
>Gives the user an instant desktop.
>Fires up Windows XP in 4 seconds!

 

Those are pretty pathetic speeds considering how fast the RAM is. I would have expected it to be able to saturate several SATA 3.0gbps connections.

 

I agree. The review I read didn't give any good explanation (I think) to why it performs this "bad". Slow controller chip maybe? Or the maybe the OS is somehow holding it back? (I which case I'd think HDTune should give vastly faster speeds anyway)

 

Yeah, I saw the review of that Hype(d)-O-Drive and my first reaction was ... what a missed opportunity. It's too small for use as a main OS/programs drive for many people (unless you've got some spare 8GB DIMMs lying around), and in any case the limited lifetime of the battery-backup looks like it's of limited use for such purposes anyway.

Have it plug in to a PCI-E slot, and use it as a *massive* read/write-back cache for a hard-drive or SSD. Then it'd be interesting.

 

it connects to an external power adapter so you can install windows on it
regarding speed could it be that the onboard memory controller is single channel

 

Doesn't sound that great. A mate of mine has stripe RAIDed a couple of (IIRC) Intel Flash-based SSDs and got >500MB/s on read. Windoze boots quite quickly

 

Yeah there are SSD that are that fast already I believe. And they (other manufacturers) really need to work on MOBOs POST process. I mean what good is booting winXP in 4 secs if it takes 10 to start booting.

 

Sure, but if the external power fails (or someone unplugs it to plug in the hoover) you've got a few hours before the battery-backup runs down and you lose your OS install. Then you've got to pick-and-choose which apps to put on it, and which you're willing to put up with being slow to start-up from your larger hard-drive. Hence my suggestion to use that sort of sized memory as a chuffing great big (persistent-across-reboots-please!) read/write cache. Commonly used stuff ends up being fast access, without you needing to figure out what qualifies as commonly used. Everything in the controller memory is automatically mirrored on persistent storage like H/D or SSD in case of over-enthusiastic office cleaners, etc. (everything, automatically, not just what was on there last time you did a backup).

Even a single channel should yield bandwidths in the gigabytes per second. Sounds more like its the SATA controller. That's why it should hang straight off the PCI-E bus and do things properly

 

still doesnt explain it sata 2 is 3gb a sec

from the faq :
A Put a compact flash card in the slot in the front of the device. Make sure the capacity of that card is as big as the installed DDR2. If the capacity is too small the CF LED will go red. If the capacity is sufficient it will go green. If main power to the HyperDrive is lost for any reason it will automatically back itself up to the CF card preserving your data. When main power is restored it will automatically restore that data from the CF card back to the Drive.

 

Last I recall, even the relatively ancient PC66 ram had higher theoretical bandwidth numbers than SATA-2. Now we can argue about latencies and whatnot, but in reality, that device above should be able to entirely swamp the SATA controller if it was designed right.

Obviously, it wasn't designed right.

 

From the review I read, the backup / restore from CF seems to take 19 minutes or more for each phase. Not an option at all.

 

About the speed of the hypero/s i asked them

I have a question
the hyperdrive 5 has a Sustained Read Rate of 175 MB/s
yet ddr2 has a Sustained Read Rate an order of magnitude higher than that, even sata-2 has bandwidth of 3gbps and the hyperdrive doesnt even come close to it ?

Reply :
"Hi Davros,

Some of it is our fault and some of it is the MOBO fault. And we have to talk to the MOBO SATA controller and they are all different. But you are correct. 225 MB/s is certainly achievable with most South Bridges. And if we had an infinite budget we would have already achieved it and more."

 

So I take it, nobody here has actually tried out the ssd as a system hdd idea, just to play around with it to see how well it works in practice? I figured somebody must have tried it out for kicks, by now.

I ordered a cheap mlc version from Transcend to try out on a Mac Mini, just to see how good or bad the experience could be (I really want to explore how good/bad mlc will work, even though it is already well known that slc is greatly recommended over mlc for this kind of application). If it doesn't work out, I can always just switch back to the original hdd. So this is just a pet project to see how it works out. Looks like the order has been delayed, though. It's probably gone on backorder.

The first obstacle I have to figure out is if it is possible to migrate what I already have on a 40 GB hdd and restore the contents to a 32 GB ssd. It should fit fine on a pure contents basis, but maybe it simply cannot be done from an image and restore basis? I really don't want to have to reinstall everything from the ground up, again, just to duplicate the existing functionality in my mac mini.

(If you have to ask, I will be increasing my storage capacity via an external usb hdd.)

 

I'm waiting for the prices to come down a bit more or the performance to increase on the cheaper models.

 

Most current SSD's are absolutely HORRIBLE as a main system drive. I've used a 120 gb and 128 GB one from Transcend and Patriot respectively.

Worst mistake I've ever made in computing.

Next one I'll wait for more reviews.

What sucks is that with the 2nd one I had to live with my choice for 3 months while in Japan. That was torture of the most perverse kind.

Even normal daily tasks such as browsing the web became a small source of torture.

Regards,
SB

 

I've actually been using an SSD as the main system drive in my PC for nearly a year now, and it has so far been a quite pleasant experience.

The SSD I am using is a 64GB Mtron 7000 (NOT cheap!).

However, there does seem to be a lot of SSDs in the market that are equipped with a Jmicron controller that suffers from severe performance issues. Using such a drive as a main system drive is almost certainly going to be a painful experience (from a quick google search, both of the drives that Silent_Buddha mention seem to be affected).

 

Heres a question with ram being cheap why are we having to make do with drives with only 16mb cache, why not a gig

 

How would the drive know what to keep in the cache? Beyond a certain point there's no reason to have that much memory on the drive as opposed to part of your system RAM.