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Are SSD Accelerators Any Good?
MrSeb writes "When solid-state drives first broke into the consumer market, there were those who predicted the new storage format would supplant hard drives in a matter of years thanks to radically improved performance. In reality, the shift from hard drives (HDDs) to SSDs has thus far been confined to the upper end of the PC market. For cost-conscious buyers and OEMs, the higher performance they offer is still too expensive and the total capacity is insufficient. SSD cache drives have emerged as a means of addressing this situation. They are small, typically containing between 20-60GB of NAND flash and are paired with a standard hard drive. Once installed, drivers monitor which applications and files are accessed most often, then cache those files on the SSD. It can take the software 1-2 runs to start caching data, but once this process is complete, future access and boot times are significantly enhanced. This article compares the effect of SSD cache solutions — Intel Smart Response Technology, and Nvelo Dataplex — on the performance of a VelociRaptor, and a slow WD Caviar drive. The results are surprisingly positive."
TFA at extremetech isn't that feature rich, nor embarking on a brand new frontier that none of us had ever been
TFA could have been made into ONE PAGE, but no, extremetech ain't gonna let us, the readers, enjoy it in one shot - we had to click through all the 5 pages
Please, Slashdot !
Next time you give us a link to a single TFA with multiple pages, please indicate it right upfront
Thank you !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
SSD aren't just for high end systems. Out of my 300 or so past customers, approx 3 filled their hard drives to over 60GB total. I built several Kingston HyperX 90Gb and OCZ Agility 4 128GB drives without problems and they were all $500-600 final cost. I use an H77MA-G43 from MSI + 4GB Gskill 1333-CL7 memory and i3-2100 or 4GB 1333-CL9 and a Pentium B940-960. Put it in a decent $30-40 case, use an Antec VP450 or Basiq or other respectable but medium end PSU, and wait for a sale on Win7 64-bit OEM copies for $80 instead of $100 and you've got yourself an unbeatable, 7 year anticipated lifetime machine. Here's the kicker.
I have an i5 (sandy) ridiculous gaming computer with a GTS450, 8GB of CL7 RAM, P67 chipset, and a pretty fast 7200 RPM 1TB Seagate main drive. It's custom built and would be around $1000 retail at my shop (at the time at least). It takes over a minute to log in and it takes forever to load games.
I also built a system I'm selling for $520 with a Pentium B950, 4GB of pretty standard RAM, and a Maplecrest 60GB SSD. It logs into Windows in 4 seconds. The glowing balls don't even touch while loading the Windows 7 logo.
SSDs are not for high end systems only! They're specifically exactly the opposite. They're the best way to make a really cheap budget PC seem extremely fast.
Why bother? I have an HDD mounted as /, and an SSD mounted as /usr on my Gentoo system. Using atop I consistently see the HDD receive 10-20 times the writes the SSD receives but only about 2x the reads. In other words, on Linux the SSD is already serving primarily as a read-only caching filesystem just by mounting it correctly.