DRC Forum » Personal Interests » Computers » Seagate Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drive (500GB) » Page 1 of 1

[|DRC| psycheus]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX_WyOhTQEw

What a cool technology with the best of both worlds. Has anyone tried this one? I'm thinking of getting one.
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[|DRC| Wartex]

Definitely interesting but still a bit unpolished. I'd rather see a HDD with huge DRAM and supercapacitor or li-ion cell that will dump it onto HDD if power goes out.

Tests here http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd/3
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[|DRC| Wartex]

PS: Was about to buy it but will wait till WD responds with something similar.

[|DRC| Isobarik]

SSDs are cool, one of my friends has windows 7 down to an 11 second boot.

[|DRC| Wartex]

I have raid 10 with cheap wd blue drives and 11 second boot, and 5x the space for half the money. SSD are still a pretty raw product and not the end of the world.

It's a gimmick like early flash cards. We now firmly arrived into a stinky ass that SDHC is after what: compact flash, SD, MMC, XD, memorystick. I have a compactflash modem and a LAN card on my desk. That's right, it's a CF card with an ethernet plug dongle. With right hacks I can connect a CF-enabled device to the internet. IDE and CF are pretty much pin-to-pin compatible. For under $5 you can make your own SSD out of a CF card, just buy a CF to IDE or CF-to-SATA adapter on ebay. It will wear out faster because it has no wear levelling like SSD but it will still be an SSD with all the fast seek time benefits.

This http://cgi.ebay.ca/ACARD-5-25-SATA-DDRII-RAM-Disk-ANS9010-Up-64GB-/250601786920?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0 will rape any SSD out there.

[|DRC| psycheus]

Yeah that's kinda what I was thinking.. WD I'm sure is working on something that will blow that away (and I like to support my customers, WD is one of our biggest accounts). I like the specs but your right the ram size should be a lot bigger but I think this is the direction they are going instead of a full solid state drive.

Why would the that ACARD ram drive be any faster then any of they solid state drives out there?

[|DRC| Wartex]

|DRC| psycheus wrote:

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Yeah that's kinda what I was thinking.. WD I'm sure is working on something that will blow that away (and I like to support my customers, WD is one of our biggest accounts). I like the specs but your right the ram size should be a lot bigger but I think this is the direction they are going instead of a full solid state drive.

Why would the that ACARD ram drive be any faster then any of they solid state drives out there?

The slowest DDR2-800 data rate is 12.8 GB/s, compared that to SATA 0.115 GB/s or SATA2 0.286 GB/s. The sata interface on that ACARD ram disk is a huge bottleneck. The write/read speed of a DRAM chip is thousands times faster than of a NAND chip. You can run this ACARD as RAID0 and achieve close to 300 MB/s or saturated SATA2. If that thing had a PCIe controller with DMA and you optimized the OS for minimum driver delays, your system would boot in milliseconds from BIOS screen to Desktop.

IMHO the furure is in MRAM and not in flash or DRAM.

[|DRC| psycheus]

Ahh! So what is the core difference between MRAM and DRAM is it just the speed?

[|DRC| Wartex]

No, the speed is not the core difference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_random_access_memory#Comparison_with_other_systems

[|DRC| psycheus]

Very interesting.. thanks for the reading material.