HyperDrive is a series of RAM-based solid-state drives invented by Accelerated Logic B.V. employee Pascal Bancsi, who partnered with the British company HyperOs Systems, who manufactured the retail product. The HyperDrive interfaces with and is recognized by computer systems as a standard hard drive.
HyperDrive I
Originally called 'Accelerator', development began in 1999. It is an IDE device supporting PIO mode 1 transfer, and includes 128 MiB SRAM.
HyperDrive II
After the SRAM Accelerator, it was switched to SDRAM, and uses 5.25-inch form factor, which allows the company to build Accelerator with capacity of 128 MiB to 4 GiB. It had maximum random access time of 0.15 ms. SDRAM was chosen over flash because of its speed advantage and reliability over flash memory. Later generation uses 3.5-inch form factor and supports UDMA 33 transfer speed, with maximum capacity of 14 GiB. It uses Atmel controller. It includes battery backup mechanism. Future plan included support of UDMA66, Fibre Channel interface.
It supports both SATA and PATA interfaces, with interface speed up to 133 MB/s. It uses ECC DDR SDRAM. Maximum capacity is 8 DIMM. Memory of different sizes can be mixed, but only if DIMMs of same capacity are used in 1 bank. It supports non-volatile memory backup using optional 2.5-inch PATA drive, HyperOs software or backup battery. The drive is rated 125 MB/s data rate, 44k I/O per second.
Revision 3
It supports registered ECC SDRAM, with capacity up to 2 GiB per DIMM on 16 GiB version and 4 GiB per DIMM on 32 GiB version. Seek time was reduced from 40 microseconds to 1100 nanoseconds read and 250 nanoseconds write. It also reduces the power consumption by 30% and employs gold plated DIMM sockets.
HyperDrive 4 Rack-mounted
It is a rack-mounted version of the device with at most four drives.
HyperDrive4 RAID Systems
It is an external case version with four HyperDrive4 drives. It uses PCI-X or PCI Express x8 interface, with Silicon Image 3124 or Areca 12XX SAT RAID card to connect each drive.
HyperDrive 5
It uses SATA interface with 2x SATA2 interface ports. It uses DDR2 SDRAM. Manufacturer claimed it has built-in ECC so it no longer requires ECC memory, but ECC is performed at the expense of storage capacity if ECC memory is not used. Memory speed is not rated; the manufacturer recommends Kingston ValueRAM. HyperDrive 5 includes 7.4 V 2400 mAh lithium battery for flash backup, CompactFlash card slot, with external DC adapter for non-volatile storage. The drive is rated 175 MB/s read, 145 MB/s write, 40k I/O per second, when using only one of the SATA2 links. The rated speed using the dual SATA2 links is not given by the manufacturer. When using both SATA2 links, the physical drive can be configured as a RAID 0 array with two devices with half of maximum capacity. In RAID 0 mode, the read and write speeds are reported to be more than twice those that are claimed by the manufacturer. Drive controller is switched to Taiwanese ASIC, instead of the Xilinx Spartan FPGA/Atmel array. HyperDrive 5 is also sold as ACard ANS-9010, outside of the UK.
HyperDrive 5M
A cheaper version of the Hyperdrive5, with only one SATA2 port and 6 DDR2 slots, so that memory is limited to 48 GiB. Performance and features are the same as the HyperDrive5 when using only one SATA2 link. HyperDrive 5M is sold as ACard ANS-9010B, outside of the UK.
