IDE flash drives *Drools*

[OO7MIKE]

About 3 years ago I posted a thread of creating a hard drive that was made up of several flash drives in a raid like formation. Although that dream has come true...it hasnt quite made it to the consumer market. (military only)

I have however found a company that makes the drives in a IDE flavor. Should you buy enough of them you could make a rather large raid array of these flash drives. These drives are rather cheap if all you want to do is get started and prove a point. Frankly I would love to install UT2004 on it, install a benchmark program, or use it to capture short videos to.

The idea is to max out your hard drive interface. Although Gigabyte has done that with their 4gig ram drive... its hella spendy and can only support 4 gigs max.

I admit that its not practical for the average joe as hard drives give you more for your buck, but it could be a life saver to just install windows xp on the 2 gig version and save that as a back up drive for when things go wrong.


http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/product_memory.asp?Cid=24

 

[oosyxxx]

i b strokin 2 dat baby

 

[Twrecks]

What kind of transfer rates would you expect from these flash drives?

 

[OO7MIKE]

No more than a standard flash unit.... thats why they scream to be used in a raid config.

 

[Twrecks]

So around 8MB/sec of read speed, 7MB/sec of write speed (usb flash)
opposed to a 3 GB/s of burst transfer rate of a SATA2 non-raid... doesn't sound so fast in comparison.
I think the real advantage is in being solidstate and therefore more rugged (aka military/sports apps)

 

[OO7MIKE]

I found these as well

I have about 4 SATA spots open for no reason at all. Seems like a perfect use for them

http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/adsacf.asp

and for the IDE fans if you want to buy your own uber fast flash cards to save some $$

http://www.shopaddonics.com/Itemdesc.asp?CartId={EVERESTD8FAC6F9-03FD-4450-AF27-A43E2923253C}&ic=ADIDECFB

 

[Twrecks]

I think you'd be better of with a SATA150 drive, which is still super uber faster. RAID afew and enjoy more for less dough.

Standard CF is 16MB/s btw

 

[OO7MIKE]

So around 8MB/sec of read speed, 7MB/sec of write speed (usb flash)
opposed to a 3 GB/s of burst transfer rate of a SATA2 non-raid... doesn't sound so fast in comparison.
I think the real advantage is in being solidstate and therefore more rugged (aka military/sports apps)

I dont think raid has a burst rate that high. SATA2 only goes up to 320mbps. And then its completely capped at that point. I've never seen any hard drives go anywhere near that mark let alone 3 gb/s.

Anyways the SATA flash interface readers are only limited by the SATA transfer rate and the speed of the flash card its self. You get to pick what card you want. I've seen a few that go as fast as 23MB/sec read 20MB/sec write. Yeah its a 120x card LOL pretty nice.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820160054

 

[Twrecks]

I think they were refering to GigaBits, and not GigaBytes. Just another way to inflate expectations. Most reviews I've read say SATA2 hasn't been the 2x performace over SATA the numbers suggest, and is only marginal boost at best.
However I have also read that seek times for CF is around 200ns, far above the 9-18ns most HD's have. I'd be curious to see a direct comparison between CF and SATA2 arrays, with the manditory benchmarks. With the increased size of data storage for flash devices, we may see them overtake dynamic drives in the near future (crystal tech)

 

[OO7MIKE]

I agree, and I have seen the benchies from the new sata2 drives. I think the only real benifit to the new interface is if your using raid.

I wasnt aware of the latency times for cf. I always thought it was slow because of the USB interface. Even my Lacie 5400 USB2 external hard drive is slow to react but it does much better once it starts going.