Super-Fast Hard Drives

codders writes: "An Australian startup company, Platypus Technology, has launched a range of RAM-based solid state drives. These QikDRIVEs can offer sustained data throughput rates in excess of 110MBps and can be up to 8GB in size."

Comments

Before anyone gets carried away...

[orpheus]

Before anyone gets carried away, please remember that these are volatile RAM drives.

The Platypus overcomes the HDD's primary liability (read/write latency) at a serious cost to the HDDs primary function: reliable storage. Note that it doesn't even have an on-board battery. It simply has a separate external Power supply and (optional) UPS

While a UPS is wonderful for keeping my system running, it's much less reliable than it needs to be if an outage (or office idiot kicking the plug out) means I lose *all* my data (sales for the day, etc.) In a sense, the platypus drive is not much stabler than having 8GB of system RAM and *no* HDD ["not much" is relative. The MTBF of a UPS is orders of magnitude less than a good HDD)

I doubt the usual high reliability filesystems could maintain a RAID/HA type redundant backup to disk precisely because the RAM HD is so much faster than the disk. It would be like having a scribe backing up your HD to quill-and-scroll -- the more you utilize the tremendous speed of the RAM HD, the farther behind the disk will fall (and thrash).

It's a nice product (though hardly a new idea), but I see it having limited application (e.g. as a HD accelerator in some server applications)

Perhaps someone can do a hardware workaround using an intermediate NVRAM between the SDRAM HD and the hard disk, using principles borrowed from both cache technology and High reliability file systems. But it'll take a bit of work.

Is there already a solution out there? Or is this essentially just a giant unidirectional HDD cache, good for serving up data faster than an HDD, but not good for critical rewritten data?
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