Comments on: DDRdrive releases superfast, superexpensive SSD

DDRdrive offers solid-state drive with extreme performance and comes with an extreme price tag.

[kswa1987]

please edit your articles for grammar before publishing, i almost didn't want to finish reading it because it bugged me so much

[ngodong]

Hey sorry and thanks, it was just a draft and not supposed to go live yet...

[kswa1987]

my bad... i should have mentioned also that i liked this article in spite of it

[goowiz]

err... Fusion-IO has been coming out with these for a while now...

[anthrothechnologist]

There are other storage devices on the market that use expansion slots, the most notable I can think of is the Fusion-io ioDrive (review here: http://tinyurl.com/c4zrt2). While these solutions differ in implementation, both offer insanely fast I/O speeds, but these are only really practical in enterprise application servers as noted. Another disadvantage is that as of the current motherboard BIOS's on consumer boards, you can't boot off drives using PCI-E slots.

On a side note the idea of using RAM for storage is not new, although this does seem to be well implemented version. I always thought the best way to enjoy the speed benefits of RAM as a hard drive were in lite Linux distributions, like Puppy Linux, where even on slower systems opening programs is nearly instantaneous. Unfortunately these distributions are often too spartan for an everyday working environment.

[richto]

My OCZ Vertex SSD drives already include both DRAM and NAND and outperform the stated maximum read and write speeds for this device. Not to mention it costs a fraction as much and goes up to 250GB in size. (The 120GB option is the fastest.)

[xZero2007x]

Um, it appears you're a bit confused on how your product works. OCZ's Vertex line does NOT use the same concept described here. It's just a normal SSD drive--to rub it in, it's a mere MLC drive with a mediocre controller. Intel's X25M (M = MLC) drive already eats the OCZ Vertex for breakfast, and the DDRDrive listed above theoretically can provide performance beyond Intel's SSD drives (including the SLC drives).
If anything, you're probably referring to the generous amount of cache given on the Vertex. If you ask me, I think it's your fanboyism or need for instant gratification that made you sound like an idiot with your erroneous comment that hardly contributed anything at all.

Oh, if you're so happy about your device's performance, fill it up to about 90+% capacity, and then try running your benchmarks again :)

[GladLock]

Uhh....How about some performance stats such as read/write speeds?

[xZero2007x]

This seems to be a good implementation of the technology. Should be interesting to see whether or not they can be cost-effective on the production line and work on the R&D a bit more to work this into a wider, more practical market.
Of course, before that happens we're going to have to improve our SSD technology, starting with following Intel's example with the MLC drives and making SLC drives more cost effective.

[DDRdriveLLC]

Clarifications from the CTO of DDRdrive LLC:

The DDRdrive X1 was singularly designed to target IOPS intensive applications while setting a new standard in performance, power, and price.

In other words, a product exclusively targeted for the enterprise market, i.e. not the consumer market.

What's the difference? Simply IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second).

The DDRdrive X1 is the highest performing (300,000+ IOPS), most power efficient (30,000+IOPS/W and lowest price (0.005 $/IOPS) internal storage device in existence.

For a significant class of applications (database tables, indices, and transaction logs) that are capacity constrained, we are an extremely potent and unique solution.

The drive for speed,

Christopher George
Founder/CTO
DDRdrive LLC
www.ddrdrive.com