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Hybrid Storage Solutions Compared
Vigile writes "While few would argue with the performance advantages of solid state drives, the relative cost compared to spindle-based disks still make them a luxury item. The promise of hybrid storage solutions is to combine the benefits of both — large capacities with standard drive technology and performance advantages of solid state. PC Perspective published an article comparing several different solutions that vary in their approach to hybrid storage. The OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid combines a standard 2.5-in drive with a PCI Express-based SSD that offers the best overall performance and largest cache size. Seagate's new Momentus XT 2.5-in solution embeds the cache on the PCB of the drive, allowing notebook users to install this solution easily. Finally, the Intel chipset-based caching option combines either a 2.5-in or mSATA SSD with a standard hard drive on either desktop or mobile platforms, allowing the most flexibility of any other hybrid solution. All three have advantages for specific consumers, though, and varying performance levels to go along with them."
What I want is a filesystem that can use a partition of an SSD and a partition of a rotating magnetic disk. Metadata, directories and small files on the SSD, big files on the rotating disk.
This ought to be fairly simple - anyone fancy hacking ext4?
Doesn't really matter.
Anand from Anandtech writes:
My personal desktop sees about 7GB of writes per day. That can be pretty typical for a power user and a bit high for a mainstream user but it's nothing insane. ...
If I never install another application and just go about my business, my drive has 203.4GB of space to spread out those 7GB of writes per day. That means in roughly 29 days my SSD, if it wear levels perfectly, I will have written to every single available flash block on my drive. Tack on another 7 days if the drive is smart enough to move my static data around to wear level even more properly. So we're at approximately 36 days before I exhaust one out of my ~10,000 write cycles. Multiply that out and it would take 360,000 days of using my machine for all of my NAND to wear out; once again, assuming perfect wear leveling. That's 986 years. Your NAND flash cells will actually lose their charge well before that time comes, in about 10 years.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
That article talks about enterprise drives which use SLC flash. SLC has 20 - 30 times the write endurance of the MLC flash you get in consumer-grade SSDs.
SSD controllers are good enough now that I wouldn't worry about the MLC flash in my laptop's SSD for general use, but I'd take a very close look at the numbers if I was using it to do anything that was write heavy (like video work or building a big codebase).
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
From a performance perspective it might be interesting, but from a power consumption perspective the SSD blows away a handful of DDR3 sticks.
"His name was James Damore."