Conclusion: HyperDrive 4 The Fastest Of Its Kind
The claim of the HyperDrive 4 being the "fastest hard disk in the world" sounds like just more marketing hyperbole, but it’s indeed true. HyperDrive 4 provides excellent throughput of up to 114 MB/s and virtually nonexistent read and write access times, which results in amazing real world performance. And it doesn’t matter whether you run it with 2 GB of memory or with 16 GB.
The benchmark results, which HyperOS’s / Accelerated Logic’s latest product dominates at will, reflect this. And there is a more impressive side of performance, which is not sufficiently illustrated by the benchmark results, but that you experience when using the HyperDrive 4. Simply put, system responsiveness increases more than with any other hardware upgrade, and the delays you’re familiar with (such as when launching a mighty application such as Adobe Photoshop) are almost gone. Not even the step from single core to dual core, or similar technology advances, were capable of introducing performance gains of this magnitude.
I’d love to recommend a HyperDrive to any real enthusiast, but the pricing certainly is out of range for the vast majority of us. Despite the impressive performance and the noticeable performance gains, I would not spend £1,195 / €1,700 (or much more, depending on how much memory you want) on such a product. Professional users who can turn performance into value they use to make money, or folks like database administrators, should not hesitate, as this product is what you want. Compared to earlier RAM-based solid state drives, it even swaps data onto a physical hard drive to prevent any data loss.
Speaking for anyone else, though, I have to put the brakes on: there will be more and better Flash SSDs within the next few months, and there will be a SATA/300 version of the HyperDrive by next year. Even so, I love the idea of making SDRAM the main memory technology for the operating system to work from: it would be beneficial if memory prices finally decreased in the same way Flash prices have declined over time. If I think about how the idea of a RAM drive could be used best, I would like to run my operating system off a hybrid hard drive to boot up quickly, and offload the entire operating system data as well as application data to the main memory. If only it were possible to equip PCs with 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM. Someday, maybe.
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I'm surprised the RAID controller doesn't get itself all in a twist bating along at those speeds!
Great article THG
But... I have been monitoring the progress of the Hyperdrives (or not!!) over the past few years... The Hyperdrive IV (long awaited) has been around for months... So why have THG taken so long to produce this article???
We get subjected to latest GPU wars (which never show MINIMUM framerates) or Intel CPU... Thats great when they introduce something new (Netburst->Centrino->Core) but otherwise is pretty dull... Time to put the innovation back in THG!!
As for the Hyperdrive IV its a crock of **** because HyperOS Systems _still_ have not sorted out a SATA-300 link for it!! Mind you at least it is no longer vapour-ware (like it was for 2-3 years of development post product announcment)... An SDRAM base Hyperdrive V (?) should saturate a 3Gbit link and only then will you totally kick the butt of any other drive on the planet!! The benchmarks results would change radically then!!
Ah looking forward to 2008!! Donations to the "Bob Build a Server Fund" gratefully received :-)
Bob
Well forget all this and look over here:
http://www.fusionio.com/
They have FAR more bang for your buck.
It will be expensive in the beginning (everything is in IT). Once this filters through to the normal user it will DESTROY anything that SATAII can throw at it. 100,000 io/s, the benchmarks speak for themselves.
doa_cp:
OK the price may be good but the life span isn't. The Hyperdrive will last a lot longer (with decent ECC RAM). Also I would rather have a generic SATA-2 interface than suffer the driver headaches of a PCIe interface. Could you ever install an OS on one - I doubt it!! (Especially Windows of course!!)
I am interested in the performance for RAID-0 cheap CF cards with SATA adapters hanging off a good RAID card with 256Mb+ of cache ram. 8x CF 8Gb cards could have interesting performance numbers!!
Also the individual CF cards could be replaced as they wear out and the investment in CF IDE-SATA adapters and Hardware RAID card amortilised over time... Still waiting, waiting, waiting for THG to pull their collective fingers out and do a decent article on this subject (and not the pansy assed one that came out this year).
Bob
BobWya,
what do you mean the life span is not very long? Its more than a hard drive, and just as good as a CF card.
I would think that drier support would be extremely good, it is aimed at the server market, but if they want windows sales then 2003 and XP are (almost) identical so drivers would not be a problem.
You are right about OS installation though, that is until mainbaords accept PCIe as a boot device (could wait a LONG time for that).
I don't know that I'd want to install an OS on it though, especially windows (think pagefiles!!).
I reckon that it will kick ass as a database/webserver storage solution, maybe just a bridge too far for "normal" pc users.
doa_cp
I guess just losing storage slowely ain't so bad (through wear leveling). I got a new Seagate HD in the Summer and last month one of the heads started aqua-planning on the harddisk. So you're right when you think of HD lifespans...
However I was pitting your PCIe drive against a bank of RAID-0 CF cards or a Hyperdrive V (?? - SATA-1 interface is a waste of money) Now the later may be expensive but it should last a longtime (SDRAM lifetime)!!
Bob