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Is the Time Finally Right For Hybrid Hard Drives?
a_hanso writes "Hard drives that combine a traditional spinning platter for mass storage and solid state flash memory for frequently accessed data have always been an interesting concept. They may be slower than SSDs, but not by much, and they are a lot cheaper gigabyte-for-gigabyte. CNET's Harry McCracken speculates on how soon such drives may become mainstream: 'So why would the new Momentus be more of a mainstream hit than its predecessor? Seagate says that it's 70 percent faster than its earlier hybrid drive and three times quicker than a garden-variety, non-hybrid disk. Its benchmarks for cold boots and application launches show the new drive to be just a few seconds slower than a SSD. Or, in some cases, a few seconds faster. In the end, hybrid drives are compromises, neither as cheap as ordinary drives — you can get a conventional 750GB Momentus for about $150 — nor as fast and energy-efficient as SSDs.'"
If there is to be a time for hybrid drives, the window on it is fast closing. As SSDs get cheaper and cheaper more and more people will opt to just go that route. Most people don't really need massive HDDs and so if smaller SSDs get cheap enough that'll be the way they'll go. They don't have to be as cheap as HDDs, just cheap enough that for the size people need (probably 200-300GB for more people) they are affordable enough.
For me personally, the time already came and went. I was very enthusiastic about the concept of hybrid drives, particularly since I have vast storage needs (I do audio production). However no hybrid drive for desktops was forthcoming. Then there was a sale on SSDs, 256GB drives for $200. I picked up two of them. $1/GB was my magic price when I'd be willing to get them. Now I have 512GB of SSD storage for OS, apps, and primary data. That is then backed by 3TB of HDD storage for media, samples, and so on.
A hybrid drive has no place. I'd certainly not replace my SSDs, they are far faster than any hybrid drive (even being fairly slow on the SSD scale). Likewise I have no real reason to upgrade my HDDs, they serve the non-speed intensive stuff.
While I'm willing to spend more than most, it is still a sign of things to come. As those prices drop more and more people will say "screw it" and go all SSD.
HDD for mass storage, small SSD for OS, installed software, and most frequently accessed files.
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Favorite movies and video will keep hard drives spinning for a while.
$50/TB (next year) implies a 4 GB movie stores for 20 cents, not quite zipless for favorite 1000 movies and videos at $200, plus back up doubles that cost for a simple mirror.
I think the idea is cool. However, as you now get the best of both worlds (capacity, speed) you also have two areas of failure (mechanical damage, flash corruption). I also hope the firmware does not create problems. It's not completely unusable product either.
How effective the drive is, is highly dependent on the algorithm used and actual drive usage. Seeing as how the ssd part is just a very large cache, you want the algorithm to "smartly" place things that are used most often or recent within it. Otherwise, it be no different then having two drives. The problem is the "smart" part as "smart" is not always smart. On the other hand, there are still definite benefits to a hybrid depending on the situation. Large writes to the drive can be written to the ssd part for example to avoid write blocking applications (apps that wait on write). Apps dealing with lots of small constant reads/writes benefits from having basically a large fast scratchpad. Overall, it's definitely a step in the right direction but hopefully ssd will become cheap enough to where it becomes mainstream instead. At this point, all these benefits can be had by simply having a separate ssd with the OS handling it accordingly (something like ReadyBoost). It's a question of which one deals with it better, firmware which has lower level access which means it can deal with it faster but has less information to go by, or the OS which has high level access allowing it to deal with it more smartly but probably not as fast.
I don't imagine it is. Anandtech found it wasn't that difficult to evict stuff from the cache you actually wanted. Not to mention that if you start copying anything especially large (your MP3 collection, or installing a couple games from a Steam sale, say) you nuke the cache and are back to mechanical HD performance.
Personally, I prefer to do it manually. Stuff I want to load fast (Windows, applications, games, my profile folder) sit on an SSD. Bulk data sits on a mechanical drive.
Who is this for?
With only 4-8gb of flash I can't think of who this is for?
Mid-range consumer desktops/laptops?
Really with such little cache you might as well just add more ram.
Wouldn't even dream of putting one of these in a server. It's a shame linux doesn't have L2ARC support and it would be nice if there was a drop in hardware equivalent.
The core problem with SSD's is write speed on workloads that have a large number of small updates. My testing on the older 500GB Momentus XT showed that in general it had better write speed doing, e.g., a Fedora install, than the 80GB Intel SSD that I benchmarked it against (same generations of product here, about a year ago), due to the large number of small updates that the non-SSD-aware EXT3/4 filesystems do during the course of installing oodles of RPM's. Because the Momentus only caches *read* requests in the SSD (write requests flow right through it, other than to invalidate anything in its internal cache that is getting written), writes went through at full 7200 rpm 2.5" hard drive speed. In general when I benchmarked writes on similar-generation 7200 rpm 2.5" hard drives and SSD's, the hard drives ended up faster for virtually all real-world workloads, so the end result of my benchmarking was that on real-world workloads the hybrid drive was faster at reads than a hard drive (primarily due to SSD-cached filesystem metadata) and faster at writes than an SSD.
Please not that I have *not* tested the current generation of SSD's and Momentus XT. Just that it's baffling that the Momentus XT never seemed to really get any traction in the marketplace, given the performance advantages of the approach for many real-world tasks.
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Not only are SSD prices going down, but traditional hard drives are going UP! (At least for the short term)
Prices taken from Newegg.com:
Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB is $399.99 (used to be a lot cheaper)
Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA III:
About a year ago: On sale for $60, regular $70
Now: $149.99
I think now is the time of the SSD and the hybrid drive is just not worth the price
And considering this drive is retailed at $239.99 and a regular mechanical 750GB drive is between $69.99(Hitachi Deskstar) and $179.99(Western Digital Black) there is no reason to buy it.
Just go buy a small SSD and a regular mechanical drive and do it manually
One lesson I've learnt over the years is that hard disk cache (in this case the traditional RAM based cache) doesn't matter all that much. Drives with 8Mb cache consistently show 99% of the performance as drives with 16Mb. And so on for the 128Mb vs 64Mb vs 32Mb varieties of hard disks.
I do realize there's a benchmark there. But i'm still skeptical given the history of how little on board hard disk cache matters.
If you're willing to make a bit of effort, that is.
Just yesterday I was just investigating the Highpoint Rocket 1220 and 1222 HBAs, which imbues its possessor with the power of Creation... the power to create hybrid magnetic-flash storage devices. Hook up an SSD and a good old moving-platter drive to it, and the HBA does the heavy lifting to create a virtual hybrid drive that will appear as a single device to the host system. It's similar to what is being done with some RAID enclosures of the last couple years, using chipsets like the JMicron JMB393 to create singular virtual drives that are really RAID arrays. I have no doubt there will be other brand HBAs of a similar sort joining these Highpoint ones soon enough.
With products like this Highpoint HBA, it's not necessary to be a lady-in-waiting to to some royal manufacturer's whim. You can pick and choose an SSD and disk drive of prices and capacities and characteristics that suit your specific needs, rather than waiting breathlessly for some one-size-fits-all solution that benefits the maker more than the buyer.
I would buy one now if they would implement it as a write-back cache. It wouldn't be hard to do. Take a GB of flash, structure it as a ring buffer. That eliminates the "small random writes" problem - you're just writing a linear journal, and the places you're writing are pre-erased and ready to go. If the power fails the drive just plays back the cache when the power comes back on.
That would let you have massive improvements in write performance. Metadata updates leave you seeking all over the disk. BTRFS is currently very slow to fsync because of this. But if it could just blast it to a big flash cache, and the drive could confirm that as committed to disk immediately, it'd scream.
Unfortunately all the manufacturers seem to just want to use it as a big persistent read cache to make Windows boot faster.
A hybrid drive would be great in my laptop. It doesn't have room for "storage" drives and a 600GB SSD would be heinously expensive. You could also put one in a USB 3.0 external enclosure (I assume they can work like that.) That would give you a nice trade off between speed, capacity and, most importantly, portability.
That seems to be what Seagate is thinking too. Since the drive is in the 2.5" form factor.
I have one. It works great, but "chirps" occasionally which I think is the sound of the motor spinning down. None of the firmware updates i've applied that claim to fix the chirp actually fix it.
It runs much faster than my previous drive, but i'm also comparing a 7200RPM drive to a 5400RPM drive so the speed increase isn't just because it's a hybrid.
I guess the advantage of the SSD cache is that if you use it in a circular fashion you can avoid a lot of the 'read-erase-rewrite' cycles... but I don't know how the cache is organised for sure.
Hybrid drives, and even all of the hybrid RAID controllers I've looked at, only use the SSD for read acceleration. They aren't used for writes, from what I could tell from their specs. So you're almost certainly better off upgrading your system to the next larger amount of RAM rather than getting a hybrid drive.
Personally, I looked at my storage usage and realized that if I didn't keep *EVERYTHING* on my laptop (every photo I'd taken for 10+ years, 4 or 5 Linux ISOs, etc) and instead put those on a server at home, I could go from a 500GB spinning disc to an 80GB SSD. So I did and there's been no looking back. The first gen Intel X-25M drives had some performance issues, but since then I've been happy with the performance of them.
On disk caches in the MB range have little effect because in most cases anything in the disks cached will already be cached closer to where it is needed, ie in the OS cache using spare system memory. I suspect in that case the on disk cache is probably used more as a buffer than a cache.
Larger SSD caches bring two advantages, the cache persists across restarts assisting boot time and may also be larger than the amount of memory the OS allocates to its own cache.
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So it is big and prone to shocks ? Servers may have their own particular needs but for consumers, the advantage of SSD are size and resistance to shocks. Speed is only a slight advantage.
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I was all set to buy a new laptop with the OS mounted on the SSD and a second HDD for mass storage. The obvious solution to me would've been to map the user directories to the HDD for file storage. Not a problem with Linux of course, but you can't do this with Windows! Can't recall the details, but there's some path info hard-coded somewhere that prevents you from moving your "My Documents" folder to a different drive. I never saw any workaround that didn't feel like a hack that would cause problems later.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
This Drive is CRAP
ASSUMING that it still only does read caching.
I bought one of the Gen-1 drives and was very underwhelmed. I wanted write caching; 4GB of non-volatile memory with the performance of SLC flash could allow windows (or whatever) to write to the drive flat out for up many seconds without a single choke due to the drive.
In addition 4G of write-back cache is enough to give a significant performance boost for continuous random writes across the drive and even more so across a small extent such as a database or a DotNET native image cache.
But for reading it's insignificant compared to the 3-16Gbytes of (so much faster) main memory that most systems contain, except at boot time when, unlike RAM, it will already contain some data. The problem with this is that it will contain the most recently read data, whereas the boot files can quite reasonably be described as least recently read.
So in the real world it's useless for anything except a machine that's rebooted every five minutes ...
A dual-volume setup gets you better speed at a fraction of the cost. You put the OS on the cheapest SSD you can find & your user/home partition on a HDD. On Windows you can do this with a simple registry tweak & most other OSes support it out-of-the-box. The only problem I can find is the SSD filling up &/or killing off sectors thanks to Windows' shit temporary file management & organization, with the 12 or whatever temporary folders everywhere, as well as all the hotfix uninstallers, system restore points (this is a nasty chunk of wasted space), etc. At least M$ has a real opportunity to fix this with what I assume will be their first cross-platform & cross-architecture OS...
That's horribly incorrect. I liked the sound of hybrid drives as well when I saw the price... The 500GB laptop hard drives with 4GB Flash for $150, should be awesome... But I, not being an idiot, did some research, and sure enough, the reviews say it's not remotely comparable to a real SSD.
eg. http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_momentus_xt_review
It's faster than a drive without such a cache, and it might be a good option for a laptop, but even there I'd say a 32GB SD card would be cheaper, and will work wonders on FreeBSD with ZFS configured for L2ARC...
I have no particular interest in what anyone buys, but the comparison to real SSDs is a massively dishonest.
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A drive with the disadvantages of both technologies rolled into one!
Roll on memristor SSDs...
Crucial M4. Latest firmware update makes the drive about 40% faster and is non-destructive.
That's the real question with a hybrid drive. If you're running any kind of database, your performance is limited by how quickly you can fsync. A hybrid ought to be instant, which would be a major speed and reliability win.
Its benchmarks for cold boots and application launches show the new drive to be just a few seconds slower than a SSD.
My Debian sid boots in a few (noticeably less than ten) seconds into kdm. A few seconds of ten seconds is about a third or more.
"Newfangled tech! Now at least 33% slower!"
Great slogan you got there.
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Is the Time Finally Right For Hybrid Hard Drives?
No.
The article seems to think hybrid drives are the best of both worlds, but they are not.
They have the unknown reliability of SSD/flash drives (they do fail) COMBINED with the failure rate of consumer grade HD's (not that good).
They are not as speedy as pure SSD and not as cheap as pure HD.
So, the people that want speed, spend the money for a real SSD and use cheap reliable HD's for mass storage in a nas.
The people that want cheap, buy regular old HD's and accept the lower performance or just whine about it without doing anything about it because they are cheap.
The middle market, the people to cheap to buy a SSD but willing to spend far more on a small HD... I guess it just ain't there. ESPECIALLY since this lower class of consumer tends to buy ready made machines. Notice how the consoles only increase the HD space at the same time netbooks do? When THAT size of laptop HD as reached rock-bottom prize and you actually would have to pay more to get a smaller sized one?
Well, same for budget PC's makers. They buy HD's in bulk and put the same size in everything to cut costs. They are NOT going to add several tenners worth of hardware in the faint hope that budget PC buyers will buy their more expensive model when its sits next to the cheaper models in the shop.
And the high-end PC makers? They simply buy cheap SSD's and charge a premium for them.
Budget and high-end markets are FAR easier to supply for then the mid range. Because the budget people think anything more expensive is a rip-off and the high-end people look down their noses at anything cheap.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
and their upcoming Ivy Bridge chipset will take it even further. Both allow for the use of a small SSD drive as a cache against a larger traditional hard drive.
Per the wiki page on their chipsets, The Z68 also added support for transparently caching hard disk data onto solid-state drives (up to 64GB), a technology called Smart Response Technology
SRT link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Response_Technology
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Or, in other words, hell to the no.
If I wanted that speed, I'd get an SSD.
And even then, I can easily just mount that crap on a DRAM drive if I REALLY needed the speed.
Games like, say, Minecraft, or audio / video / picture temp caches that constantly change, you'd be better off just doing that. SSDs horribly fail. A DRAM drive would last you a lifetime unless you have constant brownouts or blackouts, or have a very noise powerline.
Even just making a virtual drive in RAM if you have enough of it would do fine.
The downside? It'd probably cost a few SSDs worth to buy, unless you DIY it.
Actually, I forgot Gigabyte made this. Not even sure what's happening or happened with it.
Gigabyte i-ram.
I had a 320 GB 5400 RPM hard disk drive in my laptop computer, when I decided it was time to upgrade to something faster. I download lots of pirated music, movies and TV series, so I did not want to go the SSD route and have a fraction of the storage space. I was originally thinking on getting a 500 GB 7200 RPM hard disk, but settled for the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard disk drive with 4 GB of flash storage. After a few reboots the HDD seemed to make up its mind on what to cache in the SSD, so my machine started to boot up in under 15 seconds (Ubuntu), and my web browser and email client would load very quickly. I recommend hybrid HDDs for anyone that is unwilling to compromise on storage space.
There's is some downside though: I find that my computer drinks more energy now. I believe it's because my platters now run at 7200 RPM instead of 5400 RPM. This computer isn't very energy-efficient since the outset. It's more of a desktop replacement machine. But I think it should be mentioned that changing to a hybrid HDD did increase power consumption overall. I wouldn't get anything but SSD if I was buying a computer meant to be used where there would be no power plug available. I would also not get a conventional LCD, but a LED screen, and I wouldn't want to have a big GPU.
The current idea is to put often used files on the SSD, and less used files on the HDD.
I bet you could get even better performance by splitting every file and putting the first few blocks on the SSD.
When a file is accessed, the SSD can start delivering data immediately while the HDD has some time to find the rest of the file and take over from there.
That should make every file access fast.
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...and you can't force the drive to actually flush the cache to storage immediately. For the sake of efficiency, drive API's will lie about data having been being persisted.
So how do hybrid drives decide what's stored in the SSD vs the disk? From working in the hard drive business, I can think of several ways to tackle this - which is it?
1. Drive observes usage patterns and stores data on SSD vs disk based on that. This would be cool since it's transparent to the OS, etc., so it can work by "magic" (e.g. like bad block remapping), but it feels like it might be less effective than the other strategies depending on how good a job it does guessing how data is used. Also, there are some cases that are 'rare' (such as boot time) but which are important to optimize, even if statistically it wouldn't appear so.
2. Driver/OS controls what's stored where. This could be great, since they can have much more knowledge of what's going on than the drive.
3. SSD and disk are distinct 'drives'. This would allow the user to optimize (e.g. put boot OS and swap on SSD, big files on disk, etc.). But it requires users to understand and manage tradeoffs explicitly, which most people probably don't want to deal with.
So which is it? Does anyone know?
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it still requires 2 drives in the machine. for laptops this is often not viable.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
With a bit of logic, hybrid drives could be faster & more durable than either SSD or HDD.
Have the drive detect what blocks are being read freqeuently & written infrequently. Move those blocks to SSD. Likely, this will be OS files that are only changed on patches & application executables.
SSDs can last a very long time if all they're doing is reads.
At the same time, the HDD is moving its head far less doing all of these lookups.
Faster performance, greater life.
All of that said, I don't know if anyone is making a drive that does this. I know that there are SANs that do this type of thing, though, such as Compellant.
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It sucks but has an easy but time consuming fix that leaves you with the drive contents intact:
Boot a live Linux distro. And hook a USB HDD to the system and mount it. The USB hdd can even be formatted NTFS if the live distro has FUSE installed along with the ntfs-3g driver, most live distros already have it or will allow you to install them. Assuming your SSD is the primary or only disk in your system then:
(You need to be root or use sudo, on most live distros you simply type "su root" or "sudo -s")
/dev/sda is the first disk in the system. you may have to run ls /dev/sd* to get a list of disks and partitions. and note, sda is the entire disk block-for-block, sda1 is a partition just like sda2 , sda3 etc. If you have more than one disk and don't know which letter it is then simply type fdisk -lu /dev/sdX (X being the letter you want to check) and it will dump the drive info.
It may take about 5+ hours assuming you have a 512GB SSD and an optimal USB transfer rate of 25MBps to the backup disk (in my experience the average for USB 2.0 write speeds). Faster backup disks and smaller capacity SSD's will backup much faster.
Once complete, you now have a bit for bit block-level copy of the SSD. This ignores the boot sector, boot loaders, partitions and file systems. It does not matter what OS you had on it, how many partitions or what file system you used. if your very paranoid and want to wait hours more, the run diff against the disk and disk image file to be sure they are an exact copy (never did it and never will).
Now reboot and upgrade the firmware the way the manufacturer tells you. So now your data is wiped out, big stinkin deal. Fire up the live Linux distro and again attach your backup disk and then enter the following command:
This writes the image file back to the SSD and if all goes well (It has never failed me yet and I have done this dozens of times for various systems) you now have your upgraded firmware with its original contents fully intact.
You can even mount one or more of the partitions contained within the disk image (under Linux of course) if you do a bit of homework (search google for mounting dd images) or just go here:http://darkdust.net/writings/diskimagesminihowto That tutorial is how I started playing with dd images.
You can also movethe contents of a smaller cramped disk to larger drives. Works for windows/NTFS too! You simply dd the entire smaller drive to the new drive (works best when both drives are hooked up via sata.) Then you use gparted or some other parted disk GUI to grow the file system on the new drive. Shut down and remove the linux cd/thumb-drive and remove the old disk and move the sata cable from the old disk to the new disk. Boot your PC and if your using windows (2000, XP , Vista, 7) it will run the check disk to verify the volume (DONT SKIP IT!) and reboot. Once it reboots to windows, open up explorer and see that you now magically have all that shiny new space without formatting, reinstalling, adding new drive letters or mounting drives under folders etc. Its transparent!
Example command:
sda is the small disk and sdb is the new large disk. I have done that trick multiple times as well with a 100% success rate. My friends were amazed.
MTBF IS NOT INDICATIVE OF "WHEN WILL IT DIE". MTBF is determined by running many of the disks all at the same time and taking the mean of time that exists from one failure to the other. Not when they all have died.
It's not telling you how long your drive will last, but rather, if you have more than one of the same disk, and start running them at the same time, the likely time that will elapse until **ONE** of the disks in the array fails. The more disks you buy from a batch, the more 'chances' you get that one of the drives will fail sooner, rather than later, which makes it more likely that at least one of the disks will fail from that group.
SOOO, 40 DAYS IS CORRECT. If you are running 100 disks from a batch that has a 100,000hour MTBF, the mean time that will elapse before **ONE** of the drives (of the 100) fails is 40 Days. If you have 1 million disks running, expect that 10 of those disks were DOA, and that one will die every 6 minutes.
It's not that hard to understand, but oh-so-easy to make fun, of people who have specific knowledge by creating straw-men based on flawed principles.
With new "cloud" storage products for people begin to pushing off things that don't need to be fast - like music collections, for example. Because of this, there is less need for vast amounts of slow memory at our fingertips, and the need will continue to fall because not only are the prices of SSDs going to continue to drop, but our internet connections are going to get faster, giving us more cloud storage capabilities. The SSDs are going to take over because they makes systems appear to be much faster, and they reduce power consumption. As more and more people buy computers equipped with SSDs, the amount of people willing to buy anything equipped with an old fashioned box of spinning discs is going to go down by a lot.
hey!
Just keep them separate and let the operating system use the SSD for cache. At least in this senerio the software for the caching logic can be changed/upgraded. I don't see any advantage to putting it into the firmware of a hard drive. Sure manufacturers can tune it but so can everyone with a software driver solution. Just no reason to combine them.
I do not want a part of a drive to fail after one year (the seemingly life span of a SSD drive) when the other part still has two more years (what I'm finding to be the life span of SATA drives these days) left in it. Link courtesy of Hairyfeet.
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I totally agree with this. An SSD is standard equipment now for the operating system. For a desktop system I would actually recommend two drives, one for the OS and another for swap and disk caching. The second could be 16gb but it would take the write thrashing instead of the larger primary SSD and save your primary, more expensive and larger capacity SSD's from wearing out. I would actually love a SSD that was specialized for OS swap and disk caching.
P.S. How come there isn't a new micro package for SSD's? I can't see a reason for them to be this big at current capacity.
But the SSD doesn't have to be added as a discrete component. You can already get motherboards that incorporate a small SSD drive to be used with SRT.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
My OCZ Vertex 2 ... I have updated firmware about 4 or 5 times, never a single format.
You are living in the dark ages, that was only a problem in the very early days. Not just of 1st and 2nd gen drives, but of 1st and 2nd gen firmware.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
We are using SSDs in production on our database servers. The speed improvement is more than dramatic - better than 10x improvement on basically every test and simulation we could throw at 'em!
After a conservative rollout and a few painful hiccups, we've stabilized good results with simple RAID1, using the SSDs for the PostgreSQL partition. (/var/lib/pgsql) on CentOS servers.
They do have a significantly worse failure rate, but the combination of RAID 1, hot swap drive bays and an otherwise excellent hourly backup strategy result in both excellent uptimes and performance. At today's prices, if the average life expectancy of an SSD drive is just 6 months, we'd more than make up for this expense just with the DB servers we don't need to buy.
For production databases, steer clear of "consumer" drives, they last months before giving you thorny problems. Instead, spend a bit more and get either Intel 710 SSDs or if maximum performance is really REALLY important, the RealSSD P300.
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So I've bought a regular old SSD drive. 80gb. My original intent was to point Steam at it... I'd seen texture loading (specifically here, Witcher 2) where it couldn't get it from the HDD to the GPU fast enough, and so you'd enter an area, see polygons, crappy textures, good textures, then awesome textures.
Am I better off doing that, or putting my OS on it? Dual-core 3ghz system w/4gb of RAM.
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From the specifications: Width (maximum) 2.760mm (70.10 in)
I may be wrong about it being a world first of course, some of the first hard drives were enormous.
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Then maybe you need a ton of space. However for gaming itself? No. My laptop has a 256GB SSD and I do not want for space on it, and I'm a gamer. Even if you assume 20GB/game, which is way overstated (few games are that large, only MMOs in general and people tend to have one or maybe two of those at once) you can get 10 games on the system at one time and have plenty of overhead for OS and data. In reality, with games being more in the 4-8GB range, you can pack 20-30 games on no problem with plenty of space to spare. If 20+ games to choose from at one time isn't enough for you, then you have a problem with your attention span.
Also with services like Impulse and Steam there is even less reason to have the "I have to install everything," idea. Just install something when you want it.
Don't get me wrong, I keep a lot of games on my system at one time so I can pick and choose what I want to play, but 20-30 of them is plenty.
Also recording large FRAPS videos is not something ordinary people do. Most gamers in fact do not. Nothing wrong with it, just recognize that it is a more high end use.
...for me anyways. I wouldn't really spend money to increase my I/O on data that has all ready been read before. My windows side of my desktop that I use for gaming has a cheap SSD and my linux side boots in around 10 seconds anyways, even from a 5900 RPM HDD. Boot up time is probably one of the only times I read the same file(s) frequently. How many people really care that their resumé is going to pop up 2 milliseconds faster every time they open it? In the enterprise world, you could just use a standalone SDD for caching anyways.
We are using Intel's "Smart Response Technology" which uses a small 20GB mSATA SSD on the motherboard in conjunction with a regular hard drive.
It can cache both reads and [optionally] writes.
In read/write cache mode, it gives about 80% of the performance boost of using the pure SSD, for our Visual Studio 2010 disk thrashing.
However, these are good quality Intel SSDs, not the "cheapest flash chip I could find to bung in my hard disk" that the all-in-one hybrid drives seem to use.
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