Does anyone own a hyperdrive III ?

[bledd]

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/HD3techspec.htm

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/img/HD3zoom.gif

^good picture here

The HyperDrive III is quite simply a Hard Disk made out of DRAM. It therefore connects and performs like an impossibly fast Hard Disk. Here are the technical specs:

CDROM drive form factor. Fits into a standard 5.25" CD bay.

Connects just like a Hard Disk or a CDROM.

PATA(IDE) or SATA

Unlike the HyperDrive II which only took on board RAM. The HyperDirve III provides 8 DIMM slots, each of which can take DIMMs up to 2GB in capacity (no on board RAM). So max capacity is now 16GB.

Retains data when the PC is restarted or shutdown by having an independent power supply connected to the main PC power lead through a PCI slot blanking plate.

Integral 160 minute 7.2v battery back up to cover electricity board power outages (1250 milliamp hours - on board trickle charge unit takes 48 hours to fully charge).

thinking about getting one..

you've gotta buy the ram seperate i think..

would be perfect for nlited xp, on 2gb of ram.. -can ghost back to it in no time if you did lose power and lose the o/s

Edited December 16, 2005 by bledd

[gamehead200]

What happens when your 160 minutes of battery power runs out? You lose all your data...

[suryad]

Well 16 gigs is more than enough to get the OS installed with a fat pagefile and so on....very very nice! I could imagine using one of these in my new workstation rig...a properly created SCSI RAID can transfer over 400 MB/sec but this should be faster.

[bledd]

comes with no ram afaik, so you'd have to buy some for it, but xp doesn't need that much at all tbh, then you could run anything hd intensive (like photoshop) on it too, and keep the rest of %programfiles% on your hard drive

as long as your pc is plugged in, it'll keep power in this, if you remove it, it'll run low and clear the ram, -so regular ghost backups are a must

but they'd be bombing fast to make and restore!

[ripken204]

i read about that a few months ago, i want one! but imagine how much it would cost for 16gigs.

[bledd]

thats the thing!

you REALLY don't need 16gb's if you that badly wanted an app to run fast, you could just install that on the drive and get more ram as you need it.

i'm seriously considering getting one (i've emailed them asking if they're going to be supporting SATA2)

and getting another 2x 74 gb raptors (4 total then) and running them as Raid 1+0 or Raid 5, i've just downloaded a pdf to read up on which gives best performance -and good failsafes!

[ripken204]

wow, plz do get it and tell us more! i cant image having windows load and able to use in under 5 secs!

[bledd]

can anyone explain to me what connector you need for this raid controller?

this one is pcix i know that..!

[ripken204]

well it says pci-x under its specs. some mobos have it but not alot

[bledd]

i know its pcix (says on the tin ), but the top one, what type of pcix, is it a 64bit version or something.

[bledd]

i've put the stats in for the lazy people

[theubergeek]

I'm not sure, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the top one is 64-bit PCI

[hazard_abio]

The Top one is the like PCIX6 or 8 ( i can't member off the top of my head)

Basically it's the full out PCIX slot so it would be the 64 bit version.

[nmX.Memnoch]

The top one is a 64-bit/133MHz PCI-X capable card. The bottom one is PCI Express...also known as PCIe. PCI-X is a different creature all together.

You usually only find PCI-X slots in workstation and server systems. They're slowly going away in favor of PCIe though because it offers greater bandwidth. PCI-X was mainly developed for high-end server systems that required a lot of PCI bandwidth for multiple GigE and Fiber Channel SCSI setups. The speeds range from 64-bit/66MHz, 64-bit/100MHz, 64-bit/133MHz, 64-bit/266MHz and 64-bit/533MHz. The bandwidth improvement was tremendous. Consider that regular old PCI at 32-bit/33MHz offers up 133MB/s of bandwidth. Simply doubling the data path to 64-bit while remaining 33MHz increases that to 266MB/s. So 64-bit/66MHz takes it up again to roughly 533MB/s. Double again for each speed double and you'll get an idea of the bandwidth available (you should end up at ~4.3GB/s at PCI-X 533).

However, you still shared that bandwidth with all of the devices on that bus. The up side is that you usually have multiple PCI-X buses in systems that use them. The down side is that if you have a 64-bit/133MHz bus but plug in a device that can only do 64-bit/66MHz, all of the devices on that bus will slow down to 64-bit/66MHz...so you have to be really careful when planning the addition of hardware to these systems. This is another limitation that PCIe does away with.

Here's some more info on PCI-X if you want to know more.

If you have a system with PCIe I'd say go with the PCIe option for sure. Also take a look at 3ware's controllers (SATA | SATA II). They may be a little more on the pricey side, but you'll be much happier in the long run. They don't have any PCIe cards out though. I'm sure they eventually will. I just noticed that Promise has actually started introducing cards with PCI-X and PCIe...finally. LSI Logic is also another good one to look at.

Most PCI-X capable cards can be plugged into a regular PCI slot. It'll look weird because half of the connectors will be hanging out behind the slot, but it'll still work...you just won't begetting the full benefit of the card.

Edited December 16, 2005 by nmX.Memnoch

[bledd]

thanks nmx