easy raid design idea!

[arnold873]

why don`t the hd companies add raid to the hd package
another words use mico drives such as 20 or 40 gb
in a series and include raid on-board
in a package the size of a normal hd
8 of these drives in-line would be blistering fast

 

[Codesmith]

Because small drives are slow and expensive and you would have to have a 100% hardware raid controller built into the drive which is also very expensive.

Cheap/integrated controllers use your CPU for heavy lifting, your device wouldn't have that option.

Besides if you need speed at any cost there are "RAM" drives that use 8GB of DDR and have some means of making it nonvolitile (write's to flash memory when it powers off?).

You probably get the PCI buses full 127 MB/s transfer rate out of one of those.

 

[jammydodger]

AS codesmith says micro drives are expensive and very slow compared to desktop drives. RAIDING 8 of them probably would give a huge performance boost over desktop drives and the price would take the piss.

You probably get the PCI buses full 127 MB/s transfer rate out of one of those.

DDR RAM can transfer at 3,200MB/sec I think you would def max out the PCI bus bandwidth with a RAM drive!

 

[arnold873]

i`m not sure what a ram drive is?

i did have an idea that might have followed along this lines though
i always see flash memory and sd memory the kind for pda`s dirt cheap like 50$ for 1gb
now why not use this memory as a buffer
to say retain windows in a semi-active state
that way when you boot up its like a 2 second affair

 

[jammydodger]

Flash memory is not any faster than hard drives as far as im aware. A RAM drive uses battery backed SD or DDR RAM, this way when you turn off your computer the data is not lost.
The limitation is the 133MB/sec PCI bus + a 16GB RAM drive will set you back about £2000. I couldnt find any cheaper than £600.

 

[arnold873]

well don`t tell microsoft but they could get around their monopoly problems if they sold windows on a SD for use with MB`s
that way they would be selling hardware, not only software
they could also liscence this idea to other OS companies and get royalities.
for the most part the AMIGA OS was on a flash rom and it was fast as hell

in any case someone, intel or amd
need to redesign the whole pc
its 2005 for gods sake and the pc still uses some ancient buses and technologies
the new chip by sony "cell" will hopefully push things ahead quicker

 

[jammydodger]

Well PCI, AGP, PATA and serial/parrellel ports will all be out the window by late next year. So the old interfaces are slowly being gotten rid of.

Whats the new chip by song "cell"?

 

[arnold873]

the chip is a joint venture of sony and ibm
designed for the playstaion 3
supposed to be like 2-3 times faster than anything out now
imagine 2-3 times faster than a fx-55!
this hopefully will push these guys to release 2006 stuff out now
like dual and quad core pentium 5`s and fx stuff