
SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive - akeck
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/products.htm
======
t2015_08_25
Claims "STR of 175MB/s Read and 145MB/s Write", but SSDs appear to be in the
300MB/s to 500MB/s rate:
[http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_ssd_840_pro_review](http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_ssd_840_pro_review)

I would have thought write performance would be faster than SSD, though? are
SSD rates really that fast? wow...

~~~
petercooper
FWIW, Intel's latest 750 PCIe SSDs are benching over 2.5GB/sec read speeds if
you want to be really blown away :-)
[http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-750-series-
ssd,409...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-750-series-
ssd,4096-4.html)

~~~
rasz_pl
Same for last generation Samsungs (leader in ssd segment at the moment)

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mschoebel
That webpage has a last-modified date from 2009...

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powertower
The only thing this has over an SSD drive is that there is virtually no wear-
out. Though I'm not sure if there is a practical workload that would take
advantage of this, considering SSDs should be able to handle constant I/O for
several years before they die.

Is there any other benefit to purchase a HyperDrive over an SSD?

~~~
mschuster91
> Is there any other benefit to purchase a HyperDrive over an SSD?

Yep, a SSD will fragment sooner or later, the HyperDrive (or any RAM based
drive for that matter) is time-guaranteed latency.

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dogma1138
Had a RAM disk circa 2005 was a fun experiment especially when you could fill
it with very cheap DDR 266/333 modules but it wasn't really useful.

You could maybe get 8GB in those days usually you would get only 4GB while it
was possible to put an entire game or at least the big chunks of it on there
or alternatively some video content it was clear that it would never get
anywhere.

They are still much faster than SSD's the problem is not even the cost but
it's the fact that none of those can any meaningful capacity even beyond the
physical limitations the memory controllers we have just can't support a
capacity which will be worth while..

~~~
steckerbrett
I wish people had continued this sort of thing, I had a Gigabyte i-Ram[0] and
it was incredible. The most limiting factor was that it used DDR memory slots
(maximum 4GB) and the SATA interface. I don't imagine there would be much of a
barrier in doing this with more modern technology like PCI-e for the transfers
and a big juicy FPGA for addressing substantially more memory. Alas.

~~~
dogma1138
Problem is the maximum capacity due to memory controller support more than
anything else. But looking at the new NVMe SSD's the bottle neck isn't your
SSD anymore and they aren't that expensive if you need those speeds for things
like 4K video editing...

~~~
steckerbrett
Yeah, I like the concept more than have a need for the thing presently. The
OPs page talks about a custom spun ASIC so making a controller wouldn't be a
huge problem if someone wanted to sink the NRE into it.

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akeck
I came across this while looking for a pure RAM USB stick to use as swap on my
Raspberry Pi. I didn't find such a beast, unfortunately. I'm also considering
sharing some sort of ramdisk via iSCSI from another machine.

~~~
mschuster91
Why? The USB bus on the Pi is dead crowded with the NIC, you will suffer from
latency issues.

Often enough I ask myself why the network chip couldn't be interfaced with MII
like any common cellphone SoC does with WiFi and why the USB host pins of the
CPU are not routed through to the MicroUSB connector :/

~~~
akeck
Yeah, it would slow. ;-) Just for kicks, I was trying to figure out a way to
break 1GB, beyond using zram swap. I also have an old 256MB Model B that could
be more useful with a little more memory.

------
pella
[http://www.ddrdrive.com/](http://www.ddrdrive.com/)

[http://www.ddrdrive.com/menu4.html](http://www.ddrdrive.com/menu4.html)

~~~
steckerbrett
That thing is ludicrously expensive.

~~~
tw04
That's because it was purpose built to be a ZIL (ZFS intent log) in large
production fileservers. Cost was less of an issue than performance.

~~~
dogma1138
Still capped at 4GB you can get other PCIE RAMdisks with higher capacity which
are cheaper not sure if they'll perform the same tho...

~~~
tw04
Well, for starters this thing is almost 10 years old now. So comparing it to
something developed in the last year isn't really fair.

That being said, where's this list of RAMdisks, in a PCIe form factor, with a
capacitor/battery backup, and hardened Solaris drivers? I don't think I've
ever run across one.

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ac29
Needs a [2003] tag.

