Hi

Has any owners of a SAM board by any chance tested it with a Hyperdrive 5 internal harddisk - basically a SATA ram disk with from 2-64 Gb DDR2 ram that is powered on all the time (see http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/ ). It strikes me that the discussions on boot time and general responsiveness would take on another dimension if the thing is as blistering fast as it is claimed to be. It is very expensive per Gb, but then Amigans are used to much reduced demands on storage capacity compared to Windows and Linux. You can have your OS4.1 and a lot of applications plus your SWAP disk on say a 4 Gb drive. As an A1 owner I don't have SATA. But the idea of putting together a physically small box with a SAM board and this device as it main components is tempting. No moving parts and all that. Besides, my A1 is now about 6 years old, and I can't expect it to continue to work without a glitch year after year (apart from the now familiar scare common to A1 owners the first time its battery runs out and the machine appearently dies on you until it is replaced.)

regards

@TheMartian
Interesting, had not heard of this, but I would be v.worried unless I backed-up my files regularly to a normal HD or USB memory stick. (Luckily backing-up the OS partition is as easy as any other partition on the Amiga.)

_________________

@ChrisH

Hi

Yes, a backup gives 'emotional security' . As I read the description on the webpage this can be provided by using acompact flash card, and there is a slot in the device for just that. Without knowing I guess it has a mechanism for reading back the content if the RAM drive has lost its content. Otherwise I don't see the point unless it depends on a fall back boot option from a normal hard drive.

rgds

An SSD disk is safer.. and probably just as fast..

_________________
SAM440EP MINI-ITX 667MHz - 512MB
SAM440EP FLEXATX 800MHz - 512MB - R9250 256MB

@TheMartian

Since U-Boot doesn't use the drive in UDMA mode we are still limited to 16MB/s PIO mode no matter what type of "hard disk".

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

@Deniil715

Hi

I got my hands on one if these ramdisk devices this week, but as my A1XE is not equipped with a SATA II interface I can't test how well (fast) it works. Buying a SamFlex is not in the cards as long as the old A1 behaves. Anyway - can someone tell me whether the SamFlex has Sata I or Sata II? I mean - no machine lives forever , not even my A1

Apart from that. On the backup issue. It appears to be quite safe unless you somehow manages to kill off the battery. The idea is that when you turn off the power completely (not just the computer as this will still provide power to the ramdisk) or your dog pulls the plug while playing with your mouse, the battery provides normal power for 30 seconds and then the device automatically backs up the entire ramdisk as an image on a flash card. This takes a few minutes depending on your flash card speed. Once this is done the drive turns itself off, which of course kills the content of the ramdisk. Since the battery lasts for a couple of hours use there is a wide safety margin unless you run it down by repeatedly doing this without giving it time for a recharge, which it does in 1-2 hours from empty. When you later turn on the device, it reads back the image to ram. If you need to use it before it has done that, it simply accesses data directly from the flash card until the image is ready in ram. It all works without user input allthough you can trigger the process manually. Actually this might be a way to make an image of your disk and then carry it on a flash card for later use.

How fast is the thingy...

Well, I tested by copying about 3.5 Gb (A complete Civ4 installation with a lot of files of all sizes) to and fro. Between harddisks (SATA) - between harddisk and ramdisk and from ramdisk to ramdisk. The results were....

HD - HD - about 9 minutes
HD - RD - about 6 minutes
RD - RD - about 3 minutes

HD Tune (a PC harddisk utility) claims a transfer rate of more than 170 Mb/s for the ramdisk compared to a speed around 30 Mb as a best case for the hard disk. When it comes to access time there is no competition at all. The ram disk is just so much faster.

Aehhh, yes, You can configure it as Raid 0 to nearly double the speed using 2 SATA cables.

From the comparison above you can see that some other factors even things out a bit. So lets us just say it is veeery fast and veeery expensive compared to a bog standard 250 or 500 Gb harddisk. I must admit that the thought of a SamFlex using this drive as its main harddisk - noiseless and using very little power - is a tempting proposition

regards
Jesper