Looking for Solid State, Rocketdriveor Platypus

bla403 · Jan 4, 2005

I am looking for a rocketdrive (really want a rocketdrive dl) or a platypus qikdrive2 or qikdrive8. Or if any of you know of anymore pci (non pci-x) based ram drives.
Cant get anymore ram since my oc will goto hell, but im looking for an ultra fast swap file, since with no pagefile im losing performance on photo/vid editing but using a hard disk file gets alot of slowdown in games.

bla403 · Jan 5, 2005

RocketDrive DL

any hints on where these might be found or if anyone on the forums has one?

nicknomo · Jan 5, 2005

bla403 said:
any hints on where these might be found or if anyone on the forums has one?

I can't help you, but aren't the ram drives insanely expensive? Last time I checked they only hit a mere 300 MB/s. Fast, but not really worth the price.

bla403 · Jan 5, 2005

its the 20000-50000 iops a second vs the 300-1000 that mechanical drives have. They are expensive, the hyperos one would cost around 1000$ for 4gb but upgradable to 16 if u buy more ram.
They would be the ultimate holder for OS and Swap files, since i cant add more ram and keep my high performance.

nicknomo · Jan 5, 2005

You are using it to hold an OS????? Heh, thats fine as long as you don't reboot. You know that these PCI based ram drives are actually pretty slow. They are limited by your PCI bus, and the performance increase won't be that great. 110 MB/s. PCI-X ones are the only type worth buying, but the last one I saw was from a company that is now defunct.

Pumping out more I/O operations isn't going to help you much at all unless you are constantly reading from the drive. So unless you have a database, web server, or something like that... this is pretty useless.

You'd get similar performance from a 4 disk RAID-5 drive. It is nice to have the quicker random access for multiple files, but not 1000$ worth of niceness. But hey it's your money...

I think software RAM drives work fast.. and you could get 2 GB of ram and make a 1 GB software RAM drive that will blow those devices away.

bla403 · Jan 5, 2005

ive looked into ram drives, ie the hyperdrive mentioned earlier. Thats what i am planning to go with since i can hook it up to my U320 array.
You can reboot fine with them since they have an independent psu and battery backup which will hold the data and ghost it to another attached drive if you want it to.
Putting the OS, Swap and Browser files on it will allow for instant boots and page loads as well as no laggy swap file for games that are heavy on it (ie. HL2, Farcry, Doom 3 etc.)
Right now its a choice between the bit micro e-disk which will allow me the faster transfers or the hyperdrive for larger size for cost and expandability.
Still looking for info from anyone about the pci card based ones out there.

Also form above i said i couldnt drop in 2 gigs of ram, since ill lost my ram timings and have to drop the OC

The problem with even a raid 5 array, which i wouldnt use i would use 0 to since i dont need that kind of file security, is the latency compared which allows for much quicker response, and i dont know what your talking about slow since they can hold 110 MB/s and burst higher(especially when connected to the sam scsi card) when even raptors wont hold the sustained rate like that.

Stumpjumper5200 · Jan 5, 2005

PCI express would be a good way to use a RAM drive......made of PC4200 :burn:

nicknomo · Jan 5, 2005

bla403 said:
ive looked into ram drives, ie the hyperdrive mentioned earlier. Thats what i am planning to go with since i can hook it up to my U320 array.
You can reboot fine with them since they have an independent psu and battery backup which will hold the data and ghost it to another attached drive if you want it to.
Putting the OS, Swap and Browser files on it will allow for instant boots and page loads as well as no laggy swap file for games that are heavy on it (ie. HL2, Farcry, Doom 3 etc.)
Right now its a choice between the bit micro e-disk which will allow me the faster transfers or the hyperdrive for larger size for cost and expandability.
Still looking for info from anyone about the pci card based ones out there.

Also form above i said i couldnt drop in 2 gigs of ram, since ill lost my ram timings and have to drop the OC

The problem with even a raid 5 array, which i wouldnt use i would use 0 to since i dont need that kind of file security, is the latency compared which allows for much quicker response, and i dont know what your talking about slow since they can hold 110 MB/s and burst higher(especially when connected to the sam scsi card) when even raptors wont hold the sustained rate like that.

They can't burst any higher.
33mhz x 32bit (or 4 bytes) = 133 MB/s
Now throw in standard latencies and delays from the device, and you will only be able to get a MAXIMUM of 115 MB/s. The only positive of the ram drive is that it will rarely drop BELOW the rated 110 MB/s. Now if you have any PCI devices, especially a sound card or firewire card, your ramdrive will slow quite ab it when these devices are in use.

So no, you can't burst any higher. The best ram drive I saw used a 66 mhz 64bit PCI-X connection. The interface allows for much higher transfer rates (533 MB/s). Of course Ive never seen a ram drive achieve these rates... Only 300MB/s.. I think currently thats an OS limitation.

I've never seen one hook up to a SCSI adapter before... That would probably raise the speeds to 200+ MB/s (depending on the adapter - im assuming its built into your board???)... but the PCI cards would definitely not supply that level of speed.

It will be quick and responsive though.. not having to seek out the data will improve booting up and file loading... but these are very rarely ever the bottlenecks of the system during normal use.

bla403 · Jan 5, 2005

Bitmicro sells solid state disks that are made for U320 and Fiber channel.

nicknomo · Jan 5, 2005

I looked at those bit micro ones just now, and now thats a good technology. This is actually a solid state drive, and doesn't use DRAM. Much better, but they are comparatively slow unless you spend a LOT of money on the 160MB/s+ speed drives.

This is probably the future of storage... but way too pricey at the moment for the good stuff.

bla403 · Jan 6, 2005

very true those drives for a 4GB one (U320) are like 3000-5000 $

Looking for Solid State, Rocketdriveor Platypus

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