Platinum HDD, formerly known as MCell Drive, is a new kind of harddrive that combines 1GB of SDRAM with up to 200GB of conventional storage. This mix of SDRAM and mechanical harddrive will offer the advantages of Solid State Drives at a reasonable price, according to the manufacturer DTS. The drives sports 10-100 times the transaction performance (110MB/s) and 8 times the data throughput of regular drives, while utilizing only a third of the power. To make sure that no data is lost in case of a power failure, the drive comes with a built-in UPS that writes the data in the memory to a non-violative part of the harddrive if the power is cut unexpectedly.
The advantages are not just performance related, but the drives are also expected to last up to 30% longer than a regular purely mechanical drive. The drives come with a 3 year warranty, consumes 7/14W during idle/load and use the regular SATA interface. The storage capacity is 80, 120 or 200GB, with either 5,400 or 7,200 RPM rotational speed. The cheapest system available using these drives is a four-drive RAID setup with 320GB capacity and it costs $9,900.
