DDRdrive's RAM-based SSD is snappy, costly
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted May 5th 2009 12:52PM
posted May 5th 2009 12:52PM
In the race for ever faster storage, manufacturers have increasingly been looking towards the PCIe bus. And while we've seen lots of interesting things out of companies like Fusion-io, it will probably be a few long moments before anything comes around that's feasible, or reasonable, for the consumer. That said, PC Perspective has put in some quality time with the DDRdrive X1, which places 4GB DRAM and 4GB NAND in parallel on a full height PCIe card, keeping that volatile memory of yours safely backed up on a static disk, just in case. According to the reviewer, this device offers the user nothing less than "pure unadulterated random IO" that is "unmatched by any other device available." Other pluses include its cost (I / O operations per second are calculated at about a fifth of the ioDrive) and snappy custom drivers for both 32 and 64-bit members of the Windows family (Linux drivers are promised for the near future). The Cons? This bad boy is currently limited to 4GB, and it'll run you a cool $1495. Not exactly the stuff dreams are made of for 99% of our readers, but if you should happen to find yourself the admin for an enterprise server of some type (as many of us do, from time to time) this might be something worth looking into.
Cool idea. Needs to mature; I really don't see it taking off though.
it's similar to the RAMDisk from what back when
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWLaKfUhEXw&fmt=18
XP loads before the chime can even start
Mac System 7 had this, it was pretty cool.
...that's what she said!
Absolutely correct. hmm spend thousands OR just use this which is almost the same but a freak'n ton cheaper as your using your existing RAM on your computer system.... http://www.disklessangel.com/
Your welcome....
To JohnTitor...
You can accomplish the same thing by using MOA 2.4 for free -> http://www.sanbarrow.com/
You're all welcome again....
GadgetGeek that isn't all it is cracked up to be for Vmware...well it is a vm there are obvious drawbacks such as iffy hardware acceleration and vm overhead
and on the diskless angel side my school has used a similar product called centurion iirc that loads from disk but saves chances into a ramdisk overlay... even if you try to download anything or run any large programs you quickly run out of ram
@ vb88
Have you used the program? Trust me, try it then comment back. I have used it on multiple machines and it works insanely fast when completely loaded. You can run all programs and install everything to a usb drive and boot directly into RAM. and all for zero dollars... How exactly is that not all that it's cracked up to be???
As for diskless angel... no there is no other software that is like it... none exists that does what this program can. Trust me. I've been in the game for along time.
Here's what I want: a cheap PCIe RAM=RAID controller, with 4+ last-year's standard RAM slots, and 2+ SDHC flash (maybe CF?) slots. Let me recycle my old system's RAM and use a couple of cheap commodity flash cards as non-volatile backup, for a full-speed IO disk device, with RAID1 or RAID5 redundancy on the SDHC side. Make it look to the PC like any other RAID controller would. Add enough on-card battery backup (standard NiMH like AA/A, not some obscure watch battery size) to finish a full dump to flash when the power goes out, and we're golden. Recharge the batteries when the power is on. Make everything but the controller card itself a commodity standard, cheap and replaceable.
I don't see why a current RAID controller provider or motherboard manufacturer couldn't make this. Just take one of their lower-end commodity SATA RAID designs, replace the SATA ports with SDHC connectors, make the RAM capacity equal to disk capacity, and maybe increase the battery backup size. Many low-cost RAID controllers already have RAM cache slots and battery-backup capability. They just have to change their BIOS to use RAM IO all the time instead of just as cache. The only time the system needs to load-from or flush-to disk is when the external power status changes.
I'm just looking at the external power connector and trippin. Maybe video cards should be doing this (if they aren't already and I'm just not paying enough attention) so upgrading a video card doesn't have to mean upgrading PSU as well.
I've never seen something like that, but it'd be a nice option. Throw that on the outside so those who don't have powerful enough power supplies can use external power, while those that do can ignore it. For cons, I know my 8800 doesn't have any space left after the 2 DVI's and the SVideo, though if your already plugging your graphics card in to the wall, would you really mind a dongle?
The external power brick is for keeping your data on the RAM after your PC is switched off.
Someone tried it once....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5_6000
There was a card a while back that tried to cram 2 single-core GPU's on a single PCI-e slot and thus needed an external power connector (maybe a dual 7800?) can't remember which one exactly though.
Gigabyte iRam is a heck of a lot cheaper. But it does not include the 4GB NAND Flash either.
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Storage/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2180
the voodoo 5 external power connection could have been a new standard, but by the time they released this video card, they were already spiraling down the drain. this incredibly expensive card was top of the market but lacked the corporate push to take it anywhere. it was a last ditch effort to save the company that really had no effect.
Recession antidote anyone?
There is no way this thing would have a cost/benefit ratio that would allow a server admin to justify this thing.
If you have 1500 bucks lying around, max out your system at 8 or 16GB of RAM, and use a 4GB (or larger) RAM drive. Most newer RAM drive software offers some sort of backup system for during use, or when you shut the system off.
Waste of PCIe slot. Then again, 1x slots are pretty useless anyway...
Exactly. Does this device hold power to make it non-volatileish? If not, go with a ram drive, I can't believe this exists when a better, cheaper solution is just as easy.
16GB of ram is minimum for a workstation where I work.
Servers have 64GB+ unless they are heavily used, then we usually just buy what ever the maximum amount of ram is, usually 128GB or 256GB.
but still, those are handling multi-terabyte databases and wouldn't lend themselves to being stored in ram easily. I get your point though. If you have a tiny 4GB database, this would probably speed up your access time exponentially. A ram disk is a better and more expandable option if you can work out the power loss issue.
You don't even need the RAM disk; just use it as disk cache. That's all this thing is using it for: the RAM is a cache for the flash.
And it doesn't take drivers, or any kind of configuration: a sensible kernel (e.g., Linux) will use any RAM that's not being used as a disk cache. And, yes, it'll work in 32-bit mode, too; the kernel can manage up to 64GB of RAM, even if no process can have more than 32GB.
The only way this thing can possibly make sense is if your motherboard is maxed out on RAM.
Cheeze.... nothing you said was that impressive or, until the last two sentences, relevant. If you want to masturbate about hardware that you don't own, I'm sure there are great big server rooms where you work that would be more suitable to the purpose.
Engadget's recession antidote: DDRdrive's RAM-based SSD
Please?
Does no one remember the iRAM? if i remember correctly it allowed more ram then that but it is nice to see they have started updating the idea with PCIe ect.
Guess i was wrong the i-Ram only allowed 4Gbs as well.
I'm glad you brought that up, I was hoping someone did before I had to at the bottom.
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16815168001
Gigabyte made this 3ish years ago, 4gb limit, but not if you Raid-0 them :)
Fastest XP boot of all time:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-51784544344753709&ei=T3gASp7fHYSC-wGtivSwBw&q=i-ram&client=firefox-a
Im sure I'm missing something here, but what's the value? Its the same price as the Z drive for less than 1% of the capacity. Is it faster? It's not as fast as the ioDrive....
So it's a glorified, expensive, ramdisk?
"In the race for ever faster storage, manufacturers have increasingly been looking towards the PCIe bus."
You do realise that SATA uses the PCIe bus don't you ?
if you bought a pcie sata card... but not for those of us who have it integrated into the motherboard already
pete, just because its integrated into the motherboard, doesnt mean its not PCIe. before pcie, they were on the pci bus, even when they were on the mobo integrated.
But SATA is an extra bottleneck; attaching directly to PCIe permits higher bandwidth. A single PCIe channel runs at 4Gb/s; SATA 2 is only 3Gb/s. SATA 3 goes to 6Gb/s, but the PCIe approach scales with more channels.
I wonder if this would work as a home for older slower RAM chips... rather than throwing them away. Instead of 4GB on 4 slots why not 4GB across 16 slots using "donated" slower 250KB RAM? Would still be quite fast and the memory is practically free.
The Gigabye iRam does this using standard sata connection. I'm sure the performance is not as screamin' fast as this device but for all practical purposes I think either way your Crysis load times will be more than satisfactory when run from either device. Oh and the Gigabyte is $120 and uses up those old DDR stick you have lying around.
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Storage/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2180
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480
Even better is HyperOS HyperDrive 5 and 5M. Up to 65 GB DDR RAM, SATA-II (or dual) connected. It's not PCIe, but it's still fast and WAY less expensive at 4GB of storage, heck even at 12 GB it's cheaper. Also, has automatic data backup and recovery as well as battery backup:
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
I own one of these already. Can never go back....
yeah, just checked those out from the post below. Although I have many more matching spare DDR sticks than DDR2... Regardless, DDR2 is so cheap right now it's silly.
another similar SATA product here:
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm
dude, that hyperdrive is sweet.
weird how the cost is a pro and a con....
This reminds me of Applied Engineering's Apple IIgs Ramkeeper. I could boot GS/OS in 30 seconds.
I saw a PDF from an R&D dept that used a SODIMM in a pen drive, but they ditched it because it was huge, got phycho hot and could only go 24 hours between being plugged in...
I'd say price needs to come down quite a bit before these become justified.
I will use the entire thing as a Linux swap partition.
Then best of luck writing your own drivers for it...
Now there's a cost effective solution to rapid storage...
I believe that is the acard and 9010: http://www.acard.com/english/fb0101.jsp?type1_idno=13
it's $350 for the 8 slot and $250-230 for the 6 slot. Might be be easy to slap it into a 5in esata enclosure for another $50
-R
These have been around forever aka RAM-Disk, the only thing that seems new to me is using NAND to keep the information non-volatile,
if your servers on a UPS, just fit more main ram and install ram disk s/w which is free on nearly every OS! you can buy a 4GB dimm for less than GB£200 or US$300, far cheaper than that card.
Great. I love faster hard drive speeds. But come on, we need something a little more economical. How about connecting it to a PCI slot?
If you can't afford it, maybe this isn't for you. Maybe you should stick to a 7,200 rpm Sata drive. Maybe even a RAID config, if you have some extra dough.
Ive been waiting for this for 2 years now.
They started advertising this in 2005.
http://www.techpowerup.com/img/06-01-03/DDRdriveX1_Prototype.jpg
Just not having any NAND on it back then.
WHY you still dragging your feet on this guys?
I wait this long and you slap me with a $1500 price tag!?
http://ddrdrive.com/
F-U guys, Im buying a HyperOS/HyperDrive5 for 400 USD!
This is a natural progression of technology. Years ago (about 2001 IIRC) we purchased a system called MegaRAM for our infrastructure. It was a 2U rack mounted box with 5 Gigs of RAM, an embedded hard drive, and redundant power supplies each with a built-in UPS. Out the back were 4 ultra SCSI ports, an ethernet and serial console.
What it did was show up to my server(s) as a really, really fast SCSI drive. Internally it self monitored itself and the power supplies, and if the power went out, it would copy the contents of the RAM onto the hard drive and then shut down until the power came back up.
It worked splendidly until some logic board croaked.
The kicker was this thing cost over $40k. And it was worth every penny for the speed it gave us at the time.
The price of $1500 for this device is *nothing* compared to that, and I'd buy it in a heartbeat if they just made it show up as a normal disk controller so I could use it without needing special drivers, since I use FreeBSD. That and a larger capacity would be killer.
The limited capacity is what kills it (for me).
Clarifications from the CTO of DDRdrive LLC:
The DDRdrive X1 was singularly designed to target IOPS intensive applications while setting a new standard in performance, power, and price.
In other words, a product exclusively targeted for the enterprise market, i.e. not the consumer market. What's the difference?
In a word - IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second).
We achieve an unprecedented 300,000+ Random Reads and 200,000+ Random Writes at the 512B block size. An accomplishment exceeded only by our power efficiency (30,000+ IOPS/W) and cost effectiveness (200+ IOPS/$). To our knowledge, IOPS wise, this is the highest performing, most power efficient, and lowest cost internal storage device in existence.
For a significant class of applications (database tables, indices, and transaction logs) that are capacity constrained we are an extremely potent and unique solution.
The drive for speed,
Christopher George
Founder/CTO
DDRdrive LLC
www.ddrdrive.com