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A Hybrid Approach For SSD Speed From Your 2TB HDD
Claave writes "bit-tech.net reports that SilverStone has announced a device that daisy-chains an SSD with a hard disk, with the aim of providing SSD speeds plus loads of storage space. The SilverStone HDDBoost is a hard disk caddy with an integrated storage controller, and is an easy upgrade for your PC. The device copies the 'front-end' of your hard disk to the SSD, and tells your OS to prefer the SSD when possible. SSD speeds for a 2TB storage device? Yep, sounds good to me!"
Haven't disk manufacturers been doing this forever, using faster memories to cache disk? I guess the difference now is that the memory is slower than DRAM and non-volatile so it isn't lost in the event of power failure? Or maybe you can get more flash storage at a low price point?
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I don't see where a 2.5" HD is required - 3.5" should be fine. The gizmo looks like a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter tray, but the HD is not installed in the gizmo.
Besides, have you ever heard of a 2.5" 2TB drive?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Or, you can just use ZFS and turn on the L2ARC, which will use the SSD as a cache for the hard disks and not need any custom hardware.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No software or driver update is required
Some software is needed to achieve the magic
ZFS? Hybrid storage pools have been around for a long while, and exist as a pretty well balanced software solution to this problem. Hybrid solid-state/magnetic disks were in the market as well which used a similar technique. There is nothing new or impressive about this device.
Or just plug in a usb drive into any Windows 7 computer.
This thing uses 3.5" drives, or you could slap it onto a 2.5" drive if you wanted to. The thing TAKES THE FORM OF a drive caddy - it is not a drive caddy.
Actually, after looking at it more, it is a drive caddy -- for a 2.5" SSD. This device basically acts as a daisy chain controller that you hook both a 2.5" SSD and a regular 3.5" HD to. The controller then presents the combined device to the BIOS/OS as a single drive.
This guy's the limit!
In order to appear as one storage device in Windows, SilverStone has needed to use some software to...
There is the turn off for me. If I were to use something like this I would want an OS agnostic solution. Of course that would mean the caching would have to be done at the block level rather than the file level so it might not be able to be as bright (a block level cache manager wouldn't know to deallocate space on the SSD immediately when a file is deleted for instance), but it should be quite practical to design an algorithm that keeps the most often used blocks in the cache (the SSD) without the whole thing being needless wiped first time you copy a massive data file in (you wouldn't want that 20Gb file to be written to the SSD first time it is laid down, at the expense of dropping blocks frmo OS startup files and such, in case it is hardly ever accessed again - for instance an image of a blueray disc that you are copying to another disc would not want to touch the cache as it'll probably be written one, read once then wiped. How this block-based cache management algorithm would work in detail is left as an exercise for the reader...
No, it's a simple version of cache that doesn't actually do proper caching. All it does is preloading, and only over part of the device. Most of the volume of the hard disk will have no performance boost at all. You'd almost certainly be better off just having two devices, and using junction points on Windows or soft links on UNIX to move the frequently accessed files to the smaller disk.
This adapter is for 2.5" hard drives - if you put a 3.5 drive in it, you wouldn't fit drive+adapter+SSD into a 3.5" bay. Who makes a 2TB 2.5" SATA drive currently? I am not aware of any...
Seriously... did not one read the article? You mount the fucking 2.5" drive in the caddy and mount your 3.5" HD where you would normally mount it and run a fucking cable from your HD to the caddy. Is this so fucking hard to get a grasp on? For christs sake.
Now, maybe you could do it safely if the device had RRD ram to handle the caching, SSD flash ram to handle power outages, a rechargable battery or ultra cap to provide power to write the RRD ram to flash ram after a power outage, and a controller to handle all this. You would need to implement all the normal os buffer caching and writebacks as well.
Read it again and look at the pictures. The caddy is the size of a 3.5" drive, in which you install a 2.5" SSD. That is what they mean by a "2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy".
AGAIN!? How dare you accuse me of reading TFA. Are you trying to ruin my /. cred?
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
This solution uses two 3.5 inch drive bays in your computer, one for your large platter drive, the other for the caddy with a SSD drive.
Some software is installed (Windows only) that makes the two drives look like one.
The most used files from the large drive are copies to the smaller SSD drive. When files cached on the SSD drive are requested, they are read from there, if they do not exist there the request is passed onto the bigger drive. If the file is being used enough it will be copied to the SSD drive at the same time as the information is getting sent to the computer. You will not get SSD drive speeds in this case.
Yes, this is just using a SSD drive as a cache.
The product does not come with SSD storage, you have to buy a SSD drive of your choosing as well as this caddy.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
They even have a fucking picture.
The 2.5 caddy is for your SSD. Mount your 3.5 wherever you like.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"Very specific needs" like wanting my OS & apps to load as fast as possible? Putting OS, apps, pagefile etc on the SSD greatly improves system responsiveness. FLACs, MP4s & JPGs can stay on a spinning disk, I don't need to access them so quickly. A couple hundred bucks on a smallish SSD gives you a MUCH better performance kick that spending the equivalent on RAM or CPU, in my experience (provided of course you have at least an average spec machine to start with).
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
USB drives speeds are in the 20-30 MB/s. SSD drives are 150-250 MB/s. Conventional HDDs are 50-100 MB/s
LOL, nerd fight. Someone call a doctor, they might get a paper-cut.
Sent from your iPad.
Except that then you're at USB speeds instead of SATA speeds.
Remember to maintain your supply of
There is nothing new or impressive about this device.
Other than that it is compatible with applications and peripheral drivers designed to run on the majority operating system for home and office PCs, which has no support for ZFS.
Good Grief, Alice! They've invented cache!
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
My guess is, it won't. It must be a dumb cache that just monitors which sectors/clusters are most often read, and caches those.
It may be better than the current use of SSDs though, which is to put a whole OS on them even though there's many parts of the OS that are barely used. If I had an SSD, IE8 would be on it !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
There are a number of options: Firstly: Use a different machine with samba if you want to give the storage to your windows hosts. This option isn't for everybody, but over gigabit while it will be a third of the bandwidth with regular SATA, you definitely will notice the benefits (especially for async I/O, the dedicated slog device removes a lot of overhead). Secondly: It wouldn't be difficult to implement this as a software solution in windows to be quite honest. Caching models/algorithms are anything but complicated and one could easily write this in userspace or kernelspace. ZFS happens to do this on the file system layer, but it could easily be written on a much higher level of abstraction. There is nothing here that requires an ASIC design level of logic other than maybe freeing some bandwidth on your SATA bus for the bleeding in and out of cache to disk. Thirdly: Microsoft wrote off a feature in vista for moving swap to a dedicated disk (although this was forever possible since windows 2000 simply by specifying a different "page file"). Who's to say that microsoft wouldn't add that to their storage API under the disk management MMC. I can easily see an "add cache device" option being feasibly done.
* read performance only
Microsoft has a concept they call readydrive for this, mostly for laptops. It was released with vista (Not in XP and I never heard anything about Linux support) and seems to have kinda died. Last I heard anything about hardware was in 2007 with releases from the usual names (Samsung, Seagate, etc.), and I saw a few reviews (which appeared rather underwhelming (supposedly due to poor drivers), which resulted in a blame game between Microsoft and the manufactures over who's fault that was), but I don't think I ever saw the devices for sale.
There's also plans to include this type of functionality in the ATA-8 spec.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
True, and everything sounded find until I read this
"Every time the system starts, HDDBOOST will initiate mirror backup automatically to ensure front-end data between the two drives are the same."
on every system start it's going to create a mirror backup, which sounded bad unless it works like Mirror RAID which doesn't take any time at all, it mirrors in real-time
So basically on every startup it mirrors the HD to the SSD, then pulls everything from the SSD until it needs to write data. Writing data goes on the HD, not the SSD. When starting up again the SSD mirrors all the new written data from the HD and continues on.
Sounds technically feasible and that should be faster and I'd love to see some benchmarks although I'm not sure how that'd work because reading data should look incredibly fast since it's on the SSD but written data goes to the HD so that'd be normal speed meaning a benchmark might not show amazingly fast speeds yet your PC should be noticeably quicker.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
If you RTFA you'd find the 2.5" drive is for the SSD, not the rotational drive.
The bracket mounts the SSD inside of it, and then passes failed requests to the HDD, which is external to the bracket.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
You are a fucking idiot and can not read.
Clearly, you are the truest source of all wisdom. You are a gentleman of caliber previously unattained. I am not worthy of your kindness, dear sir and I bow to your civility.
Please do not continue to use the Internet, as even a short article is apparently beyond your comprehension.
You have graced us with so much kindness in so little space.
one of the ultimate forms of demonstration of your rank stupidity
Why thank you kindly sir. I hope you could be so kind as to continue to heap praise upon me.
Please destroy your computer now, or at the very least disconnect your computer from the internet so that you do not harm other people with your base ignorance
I am so glad that you devoted so much time to discussing the topic at hand. A lesser man might have resorted to slinging insults rather than actually talking about the (lack of) technical merit of the device that this slashvertisement is dedicated to. I am infinitely thankful to you for being so kind and considerate.
The depths of the technical aspects of this conversation are seldom reached or surpassed these days, I thank you for your immense insight and kindness in this matter.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Sounds a lot like the CacheCard from SiliconDust for Series1 TiVos, except instead of an SDRAM DIMM it uses an SSD. And the CacheCard doesn't sit between the devices but instead connects to the TiVo motherboard's card-edge connector, provides an Ethernet port, and is designed only to cache a particular 0.5 GiB part of the drive.
But since the SDRAM loses its contents on power off, it does add significant time to test and fill at startup, while the SSD would be ready nearly immediately.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Who the hell creates a ZFS drive by using mkfs.zfs?
zpool create tank mirror sdb sdc works just fine under Debian.
// You sound jealous...
That's because you might confuse him with other people with low numbers, who only post things and never read anything...
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
There are alignment tricks with SSD around their large erase blocks, so you have to be careful partitioning.
Also, consumer-grade MHC SSDs are _not_ tremendously faster than spinning disks in transfer speed. Maybe 20%. Access time is where SSDs shine, 0.2 ms vs 8-10ms .
A simple scheme I use is to put the OS & small, frequent datafiles on SSD, and large [image] files on platter.
This might not help large databases with sparse access, but lots of RAM disk cache should be better. IIRC Seagate had a disk with flash boost, but had trouble with it.
While that is true in many cases, when one drive dies you will get much better read and write performance out of RAID 1 than RAID 0.
I'm bookmarking your post so I have something, to link to, the next time somebody asks why I prefer the GUI over the command line.
Likewise declaring someone stupid when it turns out YOU are the one who needs to do a little learning. Quoting the Windows Engineering Blog:
Read that last sentence to yourself a few times, let it sink in. Now you can say sorry.
Indeed useful. I get the last 2-3GB's of accessed files at RAM speed, if I'm lucky. That doesn't help boot time, that doesn't help sleep time, and that doesn't help when I launch an app for the first time in a while. All of which ARE helped greatly by using an SSD. Why can't I have both?
Yeah, except I have one, and you're wrong. Caching is great for files you hit a lot, but you know what? My system drive has 40-50GB on it, and adding 40-50GB of RAM isn't really an option for most people, certainly not an economical one. You'll be lucky to get 10% of that in the cache - VERY lucky (seeing as all those media and data files will be pushing out the useful stuff you actually stand a chance of wanting to read again).
You seem to have a problem with SSDs, that's great, don't buy one. I wouldn't trade mine for 16GBs of RAM, never mind 8 (which is the equivalent cost).
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"