HyperOs, the British hardware vendor, has recently come up with a solid state RAM disk drive for PC users. The drive, christened HyperDrive III, comes with six built in DDR RAM slots and still provides a very manageable 5.25” profile, which makes it highly portable. The 5.25” casing that is used to house the drive fits directly into the CPU cabinet, using the mass storage controller. The data transfer speed (dts) of RAM drives easily puts them miles ahead of Ultra ATA or Serial ATA drives, on any given day.

However, high dts of RAM drives are usually marred by the most important drawback, the price tag. Although HyperOs has tried its best to keep the price of HyperDrive III within reach of consumers, the price is still pretty hefty. However, the use of standard modules in the drive and keeping the memory capacity within a limit will probably get the price down by quite an extent in the coming days.

HyperDrive III supports 6 DDR RAM modules of 2 GB capacity each for now, which will increase to 8 when the units are shipped. This will boost the total storage capacity to a massive 16 GB, making it tower over other RAM drives presently available. All modules, however, need to match one another in terms the internal geometry of the chips and the storage capacity. However, users will be able to choose the vendors of their choice, which is a distinct advantage on its own.

One stumbling block that HyperDrive III will certainly face is from the use of registered ECC DDR RAM modules in its setup. These modules are not hard to find, but the price bumps up as soon as additional storage space is required.

Another bottleneck will certainly be the use of the UltraATA/100 interface, since this option is one of the slower ones. The new version is supposed to provide support for both UltraATA/100 and SerialATA/150 interfaces, with a jumper switch to allow users to change between the two options as per requirement. The improvement in performance is still untested, but it is pretty safe to assume that it will be better.

HyperDrive III will ship with its own battery unit to keep the data in the disk alive when the main CPU is switched off. It is a good idea to invest in a good UPS, because the data stored in RAM drives, being volatile in nature, always vanishes if the power is off even for one moment.