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.
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