DIY Solid State Drive uses SD Cards
Four SD cards fit into this Solid State Hard Drive.
Namely the device itself costs $258 WITHOUT memory cards. And you can’t just throw any old SD cards in: they must have at least 20MB/s read/write (equivalent to 133X speed rating). These are usually sold with at hefty premium. Why this is the case isn't stated, since ReadyBoost for Windows Vista needs only memory capable of 3.5MB/s for 4KB random reads and 2.5MB/s for 512KB random writes.
The SD cards also have to be installed in pairs, so on top of the $270 adapter purchase, you have to shell out $160 ($80/£45 each) on just 4GB of memory.
Plus the max size per slot supported is only 2GB beacuse SDHC is required for high capacity drives and that isn't compatible with a standard SD pin out. Four slots gives you a maximum of 8GB in all, which means you can’t install Vista on it, but XP will be fine with a few programs. However 20MB/s isn’t hugely fast compared to 55MB/s sustained from a standard 7200RPM harddisk, which you can buy for at a fraction of the price and offers oodles more in capacity.
To hammer the last nail in the coffin, consider that SanDisk are introducing a 32GB SSD drive with a sustained read rate of 65MB/s, more than three times that of the build it yourself version and both retail for around the same price (if you purchase 4x2GB 133X SD cards).
ReadyBoost runs from a minimum of 64MB all the way up to 4GB, and can definately help with boot times for Windows Vista due to the large I/O increase flash drives have offer over hard drives. What kind of advantage this drive has over a USB thumbstick, in terms of performance is still yet to be established though.
So it's a nice idea, poorly executed, but the price could drop by the time most people invest in Vista. Although, by then SSD drives should have a wider availability as well as holding the more competitive price:performance ratio.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyThis reminds me of the Matrox triplHead2Go - Nice idea but the list of compatible parts is too limited and the price for the adapter itself is Way too High.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Attachment
So, for example, just before restart the data on the flash is arranged so the files needed for the next boot are all cached, and after the machine is booted the most recently used applications are loaded into the flash so the system can run faster. It's also interesting for laptops (Where they were showing this off), 'cause it means the HDD can really go to sleep, with 99% of the data being kept in the flash (Including writes), so all those little writes back to the HDD for the page file and the like don't require HDD spinup, thus giving a laptop a longer battery life. And, of course, on shutdown the cached data can be written back to the platters.
I think, however, it'll be really interesting when you have a 500Gb HDD with a 50Gb "Flash Cache". Then pretty much the entire OS can be cached ready in the fast flash memory, and applications and the like can stream videos and data from the platters as and when. It'd also make for a 75% silent HTPC, where the hard-drive is only spun up for content, and is sitting idle and spun down the rest of the time.
However, i guess you could spin the drive slowly (like 3k rpm) to save energy, however, whatever happens HDD's are going to drain power out of laptops quite a lot
i also have to wonder if this SD drive is actually cheaper then an iRam drive, and it certainly ain't beating any records for speed
on the subject of cheap ram - What happened to AMD's Z-Ram :?
but the CF to IDE converter looks very nice.....
I managed to pick one up for less than £5 including shipping, was planning on using it in a small media centre instead of a hard drive but might save it for when I upgrade to vista although at that price I may as well get more if I need them.
Nice Linux media centre on a 16GB flash drive in a VIA box...
yeah something like that, would like to do something with a passive cooled via board with the only moving part being the dvd drive, something completely silent in operation. Would be nice to run xp mce on it though simply because that is what i am used to.
I remember reading an article where someone tried it in XP with a CF-IDE adaptor and the Card died within 4 minutes.
Don't know if vista is less intensive on virtual memory?
Though, I had an internal IDE ZIP drive (for old backups - migrated from an older computer) up until about 18 months ago - then all of a sudden the computer wouldn't boot until I unplugged the drive. I've never missed it.
On the actual topic of the thread, ooh man that things is expensive, nice idea, bad execution.