Hard-Drive That Features 1GB of DDR2 RAM

[Rob Williams]

From our news:

Hybrid hard drives are a welcomed innovation because they are low power and very efficient. However, as Ars Technica reports, there may be even better drives on the horizon. A company by the name of Mcell has produced a hard drive that includes a 1GB stick of DDR2 ram, essentially taking the place of the drives cache. By comparison, most standard high-end drives today utilize 16MB of cache, so the benefits of such a steep increase is evident.

The cool thing is that such a device takes up virtually no additional space inside of your PC. Inside a 3.5" enclosure would be a 2.5" drive and 1GB of DDR2 ram and also a special chip with a real-time OS and CPU. Although the drive would be rated for 5400RPM, the included RAM and efficient OS would effectively wipe out any potential bottlenecks. This is a strange but very interesting idea. I am looking forward to it actually being developed in larger quantities.
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The drive will initially be available in 80GB, 120GB, and 160GB sizes, with the 80GB model selling for ¥15,800 ($136.15). According to the drive's product page, it contains a "quick boot up option" as well as a "one-stop software failure option," although it's not entirely clear how the latter will work.

Source: Ars Technica
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[Greg King]

Thats pretty hard core. Should be interesting to see how well they perform.

 

[MakubeX]

Thats pretty hard core. Should be interesting to see how well they perform.

Agree. Sounds like a very interesting idea.

 

[Rob Williams]

It makes perfect sense, really. RAM is so fast, and 1GB -is- a lot of storage, so to have it as a buffer should improve things significantly. I wonder how hot it would get in full use, though.