HyperDrive5 released

[Renfro]

I have been interested in the HyperDrive product for some considerable time now, although I never actually purchased one because it fell short of my requirements.

You can see a review of the HyperDrive4 here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hyperdrive-4-redefines-solid-state-storage,1719.html (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hyperdrive-4-redefines-solid-state-storage,1719.html)

I had several issues with it, namely:

Very high cost ($4,400 USD for base unit with RAM)
DDR1 Registered ECC RAM (instead of cheap and freely available DDR2)
2 noisy cooling fans
PATA connection (later followed by SATA1)
large size of unit compared to SSD's (5.25" full height form factor)

The new HyperDrive5 (http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm) appears to solve all of these problems (except for the size of the unit, which has remained the same due to same the orientation of the RAM chips).

The HyperDrive5 now uses SATA2, DDR2, it no longer has any fans, and it now only costs $399 USD for the base unit (because they shifted manufacturing to Taiwan). It takes any old DDR2 RAM because ECC has been built into the base unit. HyperOS Systems are selling Kingston RAM for $300 USD for 16GB (although they say that 4GB and 8GB DDR2 DIMMs will be available - taking the HyperDrive5 up to 32 or 64GB per unit).

The HyperDrive web site (link provided above) provides details of IOPS, Seek times and Read / Write performance.

I just thought I'd post this information here in case people were interested. I have yet to find any reviews on the updated v5 because it seems that this product has only just been released.

[Renfro]

OK, I have decided to place an order for a HyperDrive5.

It was a bit of an impulse purchase (something for me to play with over Christmas). :)

I have already got the RAM for it (which was delivered this morning). I purchased the RAM from another online supplier because it was much cheaper than getting it from the same site as the Hyperdrive.

I only purchased 16GB of RAM because the 4GB modules are currently still much more expensive than the 2GB ones, and I don't need that much space for my boot / system drive (which is what I am using it for). I use Memoright SSDs for my data (although I hope to upgrade to something faster and larger in the next couple of months).

Read and write speeds quoted for the Hyperdrive are ok, but not that impressive considering it's RAM (175MB/s Read, 145MB/s Write). So it will be interesting to see how it feels in day to day use.

[webmaster]

The Hyperdrive4 is made by a company called Atorn in the Netherlands. There is no mention of the HyperDrive5 on their website. http://www.hyperdrive4.com/index.php . There is Hyperdrive distributor in the USA and they don't mention it either. You are right though. The sustained read and write is better than 2008 model SSDs, but all the new SSD announcements are for 200+ read, 160+ write.

[Renfro]

Maybe Attorn will no longer be involved now that HyperOS Systems have moved their entire production process to Taiwan.

A couple of weeks ago the main HyperOS System web site listed both v4 and v5 of the Hyperdrive side by side (and you could purchase either one of them). But recently all reference to the old model was removed from their web site and now only the new HyperDrive5 is available on there. Strangely, no distributors seem to have received the new v5 model yet (not even the European ones).

HyperOS Systems is a UK company, and as I'm also in the UK my delivery shouldn't take long to arrive (it should be here by tomorrow).

I want to see if I can sense any significant difference in normal usage (rather than just in benchmarks) particularly as the HyperDrive5 is claiming 40,000 IOPS (an increase of 5,000 IOPS over the HyperDrive4).

[mystikmedia]

Let us know what you think of it, all comments/feedback, etc. I was interested previously, but stayed away because I just couldn't talk myself into going that route because of how the data can be lost if the power is out too long (I live in hurricane alley). Anyway, I'm still interested to hear what you think.

[solidstaterules]

Renfro, any updates on the 5 ,did you receive it ok and is it worth the money ?. Would be
interested to know as i am also in uk and hesitating to buy until I know for sure it
is worth the money.

Thanks
Kia

[Renfro]

Here is an update since my last post (for anyone who might be interested).

Please remember that the comments below are just my own personal opinions and experience. I am just an ordinary end user, not an expert. Other people may find that they have a different experience to me.


Ordering

A few days after placing my order for the HyperDrive 5 I had still not received the unit, nor had I received any emails to let me know about the progress of my order.

I therefore went back to the HyperOS Systems web site (http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/) to find some contact details so that I could chase it up. There was a telephone number on the site, but every time I rang it there was no answer. After a couple of days of trying to get through on the phone (with no success) I started to get a bit worried and checked the web site again for other contact details. It was then that I noticed a link to an unofficial off-site forum, and so I went to have a look there.

I have to say that my heart sank when I started reading all the posts about appalling customer service, deliveries that never arrived, failure of the company to respond to emails or telephone calls, and even rumours of the company shutting down. Most of these posts were quite old, but I was still concerned and wondered whether I'd end up having to contact my credit card company to do a charge back to recover my money.

I found the most current contact email address for the company and sent an email asking what was going on with my order. About 2 hours later I got an email reply explaining the reason for the delay.


Supply / Shipping

Despite HyperOS Systems being a UK company, I was informed that they don't hold stock in the UK, they use a distributor in Germany for any European deliveries. However, as I was one of the first people to order the new version 5 (just after it was released) the German distributor had to wait for the first shipment of HyperDrive5's to arrive from Taiwan before they could send out mine. This meant that it ended up taking weeks to arrive rather than the day or two that I thought it would take originally.

My unit finally arrived via DHL yesterday lunchtime (Friday 9th January 2009).


Customer Service / Technical Support

I had quite a few questions about things like RAM types, compact flash cards for backup etc. that I wanted to ask while I was waiting for my HyperDrive to arrive. Over that next week I ended up sending 5 or 6 emails with various technical questions about the HyperDrive and accessories. Every single one of my emails was satisfactorily answered within about 24 hours. This made me feel considerably more confident about my order.



Contents

The package arrived with all the necessary accessories included. I ordered the DC mains adaptor at the same time as the HyperDrive, so that was also included in the package. Unfortunately the DC adaptor came with a 2 pin Euro plug rather than the correct 3 pin UK plug. However, the DC adaptor is in two parts, so you can use any old "figure of 8" mains lead (IEC EC-320 type C7) to connect to the small DC adaptor box without having to cut off plugs or anything like that. The lead is easy enough to replace, but it's still bit of an annoyance that a UK plug was not included in the first place.

The manual is brief but pretty clear and easy to understand.


Hardware

I was quite surprised at how well specified the unit was given how drastic the cost-cutting has been on this new version. The first preview photos that I saw of the new version 5 made it look really cheap and nasty (like an amateur electronics project kit) compared to robust build quality of the old version 4 model. However, in reality the version 5 is not actually not that bad. The chassis is sufficiently rigid (although lightweight) and the huge vent holes at the top means that the unit can easily remain cool without needing any fans. The front panel is pleasant looking and is surprisingly comprehensive in terms of providing user feedback. There is a column of LEDs to indicate the amount of charge remaining in the onboard battery, an LED for the presence of Compact Flash card, an LED for backup / restore status, as well as LEDs for power and SATA activity.

Another surprise for me was the fact that the unit had 2 SATA ports, each one with it's own connection and activity LED (and there were 2 SATA leads in the box). At first I couldn't think why this was, but after reading the manual became clear. The HyperDrive 5 comes with 8 RAM slots which are grouped into two groups of 4. You can fill from 1 to 8 of the RAM slots and have the total storage treated as a single storage device, or you can use a jumper switch to activate the second SATA port and have each of the two banks of 4 slots on their own SATA output. This allows you to RAID0 the RAM drives without having to purchase a second unit.

The onboard battery is Lithium Ion 7.4v 2400mAH and is very easily replaceable should you ever need to do that.

I bought 16GB of RAM for my unit, but the Hyperdrive5 can go up to 64GB (which is 4 times what the version 4 could do). I only wanted to use the HyperDrive for my system (C:\) drive, and it wasn't worth buying more RAM because my existing C:\ drive is only taking up 8GB (on a fully loaded install). I chose to go for 8 x 2GB RAM sticks (which meant filling all of the slots on the HyperDrive) because it was unlikely that I would need to expand the storage up from 16GB, and getting 8 x 2GB sticks was way cheaper than getting 4 x 4GB ones (because the 4GB sticks are still very expensive).

The optional compact flash card is inserted through a slot in the front panel and has an eject button for removing it, so you don't need to open the case or pull out the HyperDrive in order to swap cards. Formatting is taken care of automatically. Backup and restore can be initiated manually by the user by pressing a button on the front panel but this is usually not necessary as the both backup and restore are fully automated and require no user intervention. I bought a fast 16GB 300x Compact Flash card (which has a write speed of 45MB/s) to backup my 16GB of RAM. You can use cheaper slower compact flash cards (such as 266x 35MB/s or 233x 30MB/s, but the manufacturer recommends not going any slower than 30MB/s write speed).

I was worried that after formatting my 16GB Compact Flash card it would not be able to accommodate the full 16GB RAM. A quick email to HyperOS confirmed that a 16GB compact flash card would give 15.2GB of usable storage, but as long as you had 15.2GB or less of data on the RAM sticks then it would all backup perfectly fine. What I forgot is that the RAM itself is being treated as a disk and so this too would not use all of it's capacity, so it turned out not to be a problem. Formatting the full 16GB of RAM in NTFS gave usable space of 14.22GB which would easily fit onto the compact flash card.

I tried disconnecting the power to the HyperDrive to see how it would cope. It continued to work flawlessly on battery power and proceeded to backup the RAM disks contents to the compact flash card. I then disconnected the battery (to wipe the RAM) and restored the mains power, the backup automatically loaded from the compact flash card back into RAM without any problems.


Performance

This is completely subjective and contains no benchmarks (and bear in mind that today is the first opportunity I've had to test it, so I've only had a couple of hours to evaluate it).

Just over a year ago I built a new PC with 4GB fast RAM, high-end Core 2 Duo, top end graphic card etc. but slow storage speed was really holding things back. In early 2008 I bought my first ever SSD drive (Memoright 32GB) and the improvement in the feel of my system was very noticeable. I therefore wanted to see if I could improve performance even more by getting even faster storage. RAM storage seemed interesting as it didn't have the write issues associated with NAND, and RAM also has massively increased IOPS performance over most traditional SSDs. I was looking for a noticeable "feel" of increased speed, rather than something that you'd have to benchmark to be able to detect.

I took an image of my existing C:\ drive and cloned it onto the Hyperdrive then booted it to see if I could notice any difference in speed.

However, I have to say that I am very disappointed with the performance. I've not yet tried it in RAID0, but in single SATA mode (for standard desktop use) it seems to be no different in speed than my Memoright SSD. Boot times are not faster and launching fat apps like Firefox and Photoshop take exactly the same amount of time as they did before. It's faster than conventional HDDs, but I wanted more than that. Disk searching seems a little faster than my SSD, but everything else seems about the same.

Of course, standard desktop usage does not make use of high IOPS like database and server tasks do, so maybe the HyperDrive would pull ahead of SSD in those kinds of tasks, but that's not the kind usage that applies to me.

The few tests that I've done are hardly comprehensive or scientific, but as far as I'm concerned if you can't notice the change without having to scrutinise benchmarks, then it's not really worth the trouble. If the HyperDrive is actually any faster, it's certainly not noticeable to me.

If the HyperDrive5 had come out a year ago it would've been more interesting, but today it's not noticeably different from current SSD, never mind the new higher IOPS 240MB/s SSDs coming out from various manufacturers early this year.

[Renfro]

The Hyperdrive4 is made by a company called Atorn in the Netherlands. There is no mention of the HyperDrive5 on their website.
I can confirm my original suspicion that Attorn are not involved with the production of the new HyperDrive. The version 5 units are now made by a Taiwanese company called Acard (http://www.acard.com) and the Hyperdrive5 is model number ANS-9010.


The product range is available here:

http://www.acard.com.tw/english/fb0101.jsp?type1_title=%20Solid%20State%20Drive&type1_idno=13 (http://www.acard.com.tw/english/fb0101.jsp?type1_title=%20Solid%20State%20Drive&type1_idno=13)

[Renfro]

I've found a detailed 12 page review of the HyperDrive5 (aka Acard ANS-9010) on the Tech Report web site.

The review includes a whole raft of benchmarks and compares the HyperDrive to various other hard drives including SSDs like Intel's X25-M and X25-E Extreme. The benchmarks bear out my (unscientific) evaluation of the unit, in that it's performance is ok, but pretty unremarkable.

Read the full review here:

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16255/5 (http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16255/5)

[swsnyder]

Thanks for the ongoing reports on the HyperDrive. It's nice to get some perspective from an actual user.

Regarding the apparent lack of performance improvement relative to a high-end SSD: maybe the HyperDrive is more suited to a random-write-intensive environment? That being the weakness of SSDs.

Anyway, thanks for taking the arrows in the back.

[webmaster]

Yeah thanks. The HyperOS guys in the U.K. did a hell of a marketing job, making it sound like the Hyperdrive was THEIR creation, and they commissioned Taiwan to built it for them. Thanks for busting the myth and revealing that the product is actually made by Acard and is already available in online stores all over the USA.

What is strange is that sustained throughput of modern flash-based SSDs, such as by Solidata are faster than that RAMDRIVE SSD. Obviously you will get higher IOPS out of a RAMDRIVE, but you will see some exciting hybrid products this year combing flash and DRAM to give you great perrformance at competitive prices. We will carry these...

[Renfro]

Here's another detailed review for anyone who's interested.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=308&Itemid=60 (http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=308&Itemid=60)


Conclusion summary:


Pros:
+ Impressive 510 MBps read and 157 write bandwidth in ATTO
+ Internal RAID-0 architecture offers huge read-from performance
+ Data backup available through Compact Flash (CF) card
+ Not particular to speed and latency of DDR2
+ Does not require special device driver (PnP device)
+ SSD capacity is only limited by DDR module density
+ Very low 0.08ms random access time
+ Offers standard (single) and RAID-0 configuration modes


Cons:
- Poor price to capacity ratio ($22 per GB)
- USB would have been a better backup interface
- SATA controller gets extremely warm
- Sensitive data retention system
- Warranty service and technical support are difficult to obtain

[David75]

Performances aren't that impressive are they?
SSDs are already approaching that.
What would be the reason (if price isn't a problem) that would entice a user to use that particular solution as opposed to a X25-E or a futur model that will quickly outperform it?

Thanks

[Renfro]

Performances aren't that impressive are they?
Throughput isn't impressive, but that has already been said that earlier in this thread.

What would be the reason (if price isn't a problem) that would entice a user to use that particular solution as opposed to a X25-E or a futur model that will quickly outperform it?
The reason that someone would use a HyperDrive / Acard is simple. IOPS.

Other than that, there are better SSD solutions

[David75]

Acard solution is great in
File copy
Webserver, Fileserver, Workstation

But price and storage size are great drawbacks.

To summ it up, even if it was obvious from the start, it's not for non professional users, even geeks.

Thanks for the precisions, the techreport review tells it all ;)