Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by powertower on Thursday September 03, 2015 @05:32PM
(#10167649)
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?
Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by dogma1138 on Thursday September 03, 2015 @03:58PM
(#10167167)
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..
Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by steckerbrett on Thursday September 03, 2015 @04:14PM
(#10167259)
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.
Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by dogma1138 on Thursday September 03, 2015 @04:43PM
(#10167419)
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...
Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by steckerbrett on Thursday September 03, 2015 @05:49PM
(#10167732)
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.
Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by akeck on Thursday September 03, 2015 @04:41PM
(#10167413)
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.
Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by mschuster91 on Thursday September 03, 2015 @05:49PM
(#10167729)
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 :/
Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by akeck on Thursday September 03, 2015 @07:27PM
(#10168083)
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.
Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by tw04 on Thursday September 03, 2015 @05:05PM
(#10167522)
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.
I would have thought write performance would be faster than SSD, though? are SSD rates really that fast? wow...
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.
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..
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 :/
http://www.ddrdrive.com/menu4.html
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.