Solid State Hard Drives

[newland]

Hi All

Anyone know of any Solid State Hard Disks becomming avliable soon?

For me the slowest thing on a PC is the HD. I'm looking for a fast HD and solid State has to be the quickest with no moving parts.

I've heard thet with apple using the chips in Their nanos that we should expect some Solid start drives very soon.

Any one know anything about it or what speeds to expect?

Cheers

Newland

 

[Trippledence]

I have seen these before. They where developed for use in tanks and so on, where its too jumpy for a spinning disk. I saw one company that was providing them a while back, will have a google for some links when I get back from work.

From what I rember reading they where not that impressivly fast. for the price.

 

[newland]

Yeah thats what i thought. I've seen some that are slower than IDE around about 60MBs which seams really low.

 

[Phnom_Penh]

These aren't going to happen for a few years at least. At the moment sold state storage only has a limited number of writes before it stops working. Untill we create a type that isn't limited, we won't be seing anything significant.

 

[newland]

Yeah what is it with that? only x number of writes. I really would have thought they would put more effort into solid state disks as they seam to be all the rage.

 

[succuba]

Hi All

Anyone know of any Solid State Hard Disks becomming avliable soon?

For me the slowest thing on a PC is the HD. I'm looking for a fast HD and solid State has to be the quickest with no moving parts.

I've heard thet with apple using the chips in Their nanos that we should expect some Solid start drives very soon.

Any one know anything about it or what speeds to expect?

Cheers

Newland

Solid state DDR drive goes into prototype

Source: INQUIRER : Tuesday 03 January 2006, 00:26

A FIRM is readying a solid state disk drive aimed at the computer enthusiast and likely to be released this quarter.

The DDR Drive X1 is a PCI Express based plug in card with 8GB of capacity, and bootable.

According to sources close to the firm, the drive will have a custom and upgradeable high performance DMA Engine, an external power jack with a switching AC adaptor, and will go into a 512 unit initial production run.

Although the firm gave no details of the pricing, a solid state drive at an affordable price is likely to be a popular item.

END

Looks like they will be available in the first Quarter 06, not very big really, they just look like an extention of RAM to me but could br wrong.

regards

xuccuba

 

[JN]

I believe gigabyte already sell a PCI card that you can fill with DDR ram and use as a bootable drive. The card has battery backup to ensure that if your PC is turned off, data is not lost.

However, in testing, the real world performance of the drive wasn't that much better than a good sata disk. Hopefully this device won't be the same.

 

[succuba]

I believe gigabyte already sell a PCI card that you can fill with DDR ram and use as a bootable drive. The card has battery backup to ensure that if your PC is turned off, data is not lost.

However, in testing, the real world performance of the drive wasn't that much better than a good sata disk. Hopefully this device won't be the same.

Looks like it will be no better than that one XMS

http://upload.sysxtreme.com/0.X/0.8133966/DDRdriveX1_Prototype.jpg

regards

succuba

 

[JN]

Looks like it will be no better than that one XMS

http://upload.sysxtreme.com/0.X/0.8133966/DDRdriveX1_Prototype.jpg

regards

succuba

I remember the limitation of the Gigabyte one being that it couldnt accept ram faster than PC2100 - but to be honest, it would cost a fortune to get 8gb of any type of ram greater than PC2100 anyway.

They need to move away from this "stick of ram on a card" idea, and take it back to the drawing board.

 

[FragTek]

Yup I started a thread about the new i-RAM2 from Gigabyte. It looks about the best option for quick burstable speed. It will feature DDR2 and enough slots for 16gb's of RAM and now runs on SATA2 rather than hogging a PCI slot. Looks pretty promising, thinking about getting one to put my OS and benchmark proggies on.

 

[succuba]

Yea FragTek, my vision for the future would see GigaByte building a M/B with a 16gig built in hard drive powered by the CMOS battery. Load the OS there, way to go...

succuba

 

[Phnom_Penh]

Problem with ram based drives is that if you have a powercut or the psu for the card dies, as soon as the battery runs out you lose everything.

 

[FarFarAway]

Roll on the days of a "light" OS that installs in under 1 munite and automatically downloads all the latest drivers for your hardware

THEN solid state storage would be awesome :wavey:

 

[succuba]

Problem with ram based drives is that if you have a powercut or the psu for the card dies, as soon as the battery runs out you lose everything.

Yep, thats the problem, there will have to be built in some kind of battery power warning system, but even so CMOS batteries last a long time, years even, can't remember the last time I had to change a CMOS battery.

regards

succuba

EDIT - for spelling correction

 

[Phnom_Penh]

Yep, thats the problem, there will have to be built in some kind of battery power warning system, but even so CMOS batteries last a long time, years even, can't remember the last time I had to change a CMOS battery.

regards

succuba

EDIT - for spelling correction

CMOS batteries only get used when the pcs are off, and the power useage is tiny as the amount of information they hold is very small. Whereas for a ram drive of a few gb, the voltage would be 13.2 volts or so an hour.

 

[succuba]

Thats interesting Phnom_Penh

Interested to know where you got the info regarding that voltage figure from, this figure is only the PD, i would be interested to know the current drain, have you these figures.

regards

succuba

 

[Phnom_Penh]

Thats interesting Phnom_Penh

Interested to know where you got the info regarding that voltage figure from, this figure is only the PD, i would be interested to know the current drain, have you these figures.

regards

succuba

its written on the side of ram although that said, afaik SDram is 3.3 and DDR is more like 2.8, not sure about power though, but a cr2032 is not going to last for long .

 

[succuba]

its written on the side of ram although that said, afaik SDram is 3.3 and DDR is more like 2.8, not sure about power though, but a cr2032 is not going to last for long .

Yep, it would need something like two rechargable batteries, one as standby. Or even dump the contents of the ram drive onto a hard drive as backup every time you shut dowm. Anyway this is all hyperthetical.

Regards

succuba

 

[newland]

Its looking like more of a relality but i defentaly agree that they need to get away from the memory stick idea.

 

[FragTek]

Power cuts and batteries dieing really don't worry me... I've always got power and if for some reason it does go off, certainly not long enough to drain the backup batteries.

The i-RAM 2 card supports up to 4x2GB of DDR2 4200. GIGABYTE intends for the i-RAM to replace the HDD of the PC. How could the i-RAM 2 make RAM memory hold information even if the power is shut off? The i-RAM 2 ingeniously connects via SATA to the motherboard, and the card is equipped with an integrated rechargeable battery that guarantees your data will not be erased when the computer is shut down. The batteries will hold the data for a maximum of 16 hours between the shutdown and the following reboot.

Tiz long enough for me