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."

Comments

bcache

[Anonymous Coward]

For Linux users: http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/

Lets you use any SSD as a cache in front of another filesystem.

Re:bcache

[drinkypoo]

Lets you use any SSD as a cache in front of another filesystem.

It would be niftier if it would let you use it as a block cache in front of any filesystem, instead of just one located on a specially-prepared partition. dm-cache will do this but isn't up to date.

Re:bcache

[mitgib]

Lets you use any SSD as a cache in front of another filesystem.

It would be niftier if it would let you use it as a block cache in front of any filesystem, instead of just one located on a specially-prepared partition. dm-cache will do this but isn't up to date.

Maybe Flashcache would be a better choice for some. I use this as a read-cache on several VPS nodes and the results are impressive.

Re:bcache

[antifoidulus]

Flashcache is a block-level caching algorithm, which means that it will work with any device, but it takes a metric TON of memory as it has to retain cache info for every block on the device. If you have the memory then yeah, you can get some speedup from it, but if you are memory constrained eating up that much memory for the small performance boost isn't worth it.

Re:bcache

[Anonymous Coward]

For Linux users: http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/

Lets you use any SSD as a cache in front of another filesystem.

For ZFS users:
* read cache: zpool add {pool} cache {device}
* write cache: zpool add {pool} log {device}

Re:bcache

[Gaygirlie]

That's what I use on my laptop: I've got a 16GB class10 SDHC-card formatted as NTFS and fully dedicated to ReadyBoost and I do notice some speed-up in boot and firing up applications. Nothing spectacular and obviously an SSD would be ideal, but it is still better than nothing, especially with the prices SDHC-cards go for nowadays.

Re:bcache

[Nimey]

Likewise I'm using a 16GB USB3 stick for Readyboost. It's certainly speeding up Saints Row the Third's otherwise atrocious loading times: something like 5 seconds to load my campaign versus a minute or so without.

Re:bcache

[ilkahn]

well this is great.

Re:bcache

[ShoulderOfOrion]

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.

Re:bcache

[ToasterMonkey]

For Linux users: http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/

Lets you use any SSD as a cache in front of another filesystem.

Solaris and Windows have been shipping with production ready L2 FS cache for years already, L2ARC/ReadyBoost. I'll give Apple a pass because their systems are mostly not designed for adding drives, and they were apparently betting on high capacity SSDs coming down in price by now. Desktops have less of a need for caches in the tens of GB anyway. Linux, as a server OS doesn't have much of a good excuse, why wasn't L2 cache worked out years ago when everyone was racing for TRIM support? Using smaller cheaper SSD drives as L2 cache almost makes too much sense. It covers up the short write cycle lifetime and poor sequential read performance. 60 some odd GB of cache starts to look pretty dang good for a lot of server workloads.

I feel I should point this out because these cheesy Linux +1 MeToo posts are _really_ aggravating to people who use it professionally. It's a tool. We're not in love with it.

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1114013
The developer apparently didn't even know what the ARC algorithm is... which is just bizarre, like developing a race car without knowing what variable valve timing is. Not saying it is needed, but what level of quality do you expect out of this?

Re:bcache

[terminal.dk]

You should not expect much speedup from using a 10Mbyte/s memory card in front of a standard 150 MByte/s sustained transfer drive.

If the small files are stored in your cache, you might save some seek time. But you can't compare some ultra-slow USB / SDHC card to a 2-300 Mbyte/s SSD.

I tried the SDHC, did not work well. A fast USB 3.0 stick in a USB 2.0 port was way better, but still does not compare to SSD.

Re:bcache

[Gaygirlie]

You should not expect much speedup from using a 10Mbyte/s memory card in front of a standard 150 MByte/s sustained transfer drive.

You said it yourself: "sustained." The whole point with ReadyBoost is that it uses these Flash-devices for matters where low latency is more important, sustained transfer-rate is therefore not important. It doesn't even try to cache multi-megabyte files, it caches small files and details that are accessed frequently: a regular HDD is quite bad at reading dozens of small files from all over the disk due to seek times.

If the small files are stored in your cache, you might save some seek time. But you can't compare some ultra-slow USB / SDHC card to a 2-300 Mbyte/s SSD.

That's what I said.

I tried the SDHC, did not work well. A fast USB 3.0 stick in a USB 2.0 port was way better, but still does not compare to SSD.

If you were expecting SSD-level performance then you clearly didn't understand fully what you were doing in the first place. It is not meant to replace an SSD, it is simply meant to speed up your system as compared to only using a regular HDD.

Re:bcache

[Skal Tura]

last time i checked bcache was during last winter, and it was FAR FAR ready from serious production.
Maybe the situation has improved now, but back then it was deemed too experimental for our usage.
Also because it requires custom kernel it's not a choice for us in production as we operate so many servers a server setup routine time increase of 30mins is just too much most of the time.

Might take a new look into it tho :)

Re:bcache

[Skal Tura]

USB latency is actually rather high. Infact, rather VERY high.

Absolute minimum latency for a fetch is 16ms on USB port. It seems this has had some work on it, now being 125Hz rate by default, instead of 90.
But still 8ms for sending request for file, device gets it, let's assume it's ultra fast and takes just 3ms to find, fetch and prep reply packet (and assuming fits on 1 packet), it means 16ms has been spent BEFORE the data can be sent back, 24ms for the whole round trip.

HDDs seek faster than this, SO if your HDD is not having other activity, for single fetch your HDD is faster. Unless it's Caviar Green.

Re:bcache

[Skal Tura]

Mac OSX is basicly highly modified FreeBSD/NetBSD, so it might actually already have ZFS support, therefore L2ARC.
Knowing apple tho they have probably disabled it and gives you no means to even try using ZFS.
Besides that they've probably locked down SSD support to few select drives as well.

Linux does not by default have these options but several are available. I bet some vendors do include these supports.
For ZFS you don't need kernel mods in many distros.

Re:bcache

[aliquis]

Lots of guessing here...

They have had ZFS. I don't know what the current state is. And I don't know why it's not used. They made Timemachine without it.

I wouldn't be surprised if many OS X hacks run on SSD but I have no idea. A simple Google search with insanelymac or osx86 added to the search will likely answer that quickly.

Re:bcache

[NighthawkFoo]

Because then you'll waste writes on /tmp and /var.

Re:bcache

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll want /tmp and (depending on installed servers and how your distro is configured) /var on the HDD; if you have enough RAM, /tmp and /var/tmp on a tmpfs and the rest of /var on the HDD. So, / on the SSD, /home and /var on the HDD, and /tmp and /var/tmp either on tmpfs or on the HDD. /usr and /boot as dedicated partitions on the SSD may be a good idea too, all with sane defaults (for example, /boot should be mounted only when you update the kernel, / can be read-only and remounted in place when doing your weekly updates, etc).

Re:bcache

[doublebackslash]

To be fair the grand parent mis spoke. It *is* a block level cache in front of one or more other block devices. Many devices can share one cache and, I think, vice versa. I'm going to try and get it compiled and running.

Re:bcache

[ThatOtherGuy435]

OS X had an experimental/development version of a ZFS kernel module that could be enabled from CLI in... I think 10.4 or .5. Since then, it was depreciated and removed, leaving no current ZFS support.

Re:bcache

[karnal]

While I don't know the technical details as much, readyboost does help in some situations - so there's got to be something else happening on a hard drive that is even higher latency than what you're describing about one link in the chain of USB. I have an older 4gb CF card in my machine at home - no other use, so I cranked it into a readyboost drive. It can peak out USB sustained speeds (it's a UDMA5 capable drive) and I do have it going through a USB controller, but once the OS is loaded things are just snappy overall. My main HDD is a raptor, so it's about as fast as you'll get on a consumer level HDD from a seek perspective.

Re:bcache

[RoboJ1M]

What would be really cool is if they integrated one of these linux accelerator technologies into one of the android community roms.

That way, instead of choosing whether you have your dalvik cache or data folders on fast but small internal memory or slow but big microSD cards you could just use the small fast internal memory as an accelerator cache for the microSSD card.

Re:bcache

[Hal_Porter]

The developer apparently didn't even know what the ARC algorithm is... which is just bizarre, like developing a race car without knowing what variable valve timing is. Not saying it is needed, but what level of quality do you expect out of this?

ARC is patented. Linux uses only older non patented algorithms. It's sort of like one of the beta males in a pack of lions who only get the bits of the kill that the alpha males don't want.

Also don't worry about quality. I'm sure the developer copied a few manga mkv files to and from the cache before releasing it.

Re:bcache

[andy16666]

The benefit of ReadyBoost isn't strictly speaking tied to the ready boot device's latency or transfer rate. It's the fact that distributing some small random reads to another device can dramatically reduce the number of seeks required by the hard drive, exponentially improving its performance. As most of us probably already know, hard drives are at their worst when they are trying to multitask which is why ReadyBoost can make such a huge difference.

Re:bcache

[dgatwood]

See here for info about a soon-to-be-released ZFS implementation based on that source code.

Re:bcache

[swilly]

I prefer /tmp to use tmpfs, but that may be my Solaris background talking.

One potential downside to having /var on a separate drive is that you now have two drives that can prevent you from booting instead of one. This isn't that big of a deal, but it is something you should plan for.

Re:bcache

[marcosdumay]

Why don't you use a tmpfs on /tmp?

About /var, I'd be willing to waste writes (you mean, burning out the memory, right?) on it.

Re:bcache

[marcosdumay]

You don't need that much RAM for tmpfs, as it can use swap as well.

Re:bcache

[drinkypoo]

That part should be fairly easy at this point so long as you are tracking the kernel sources as closely as the developer. I balked at reformatting my volume because I wasn't ready, and now my root is on my SSD because I was impatient. At this point I want to wait for it to show up in mainline so that I don't have to configure such a bleeding-edge kernel to play with it, at which point I will be very interested again.

Re:bcache

[ras]

It would be niftier if it would let you use it as a block cache in front of any filesystem, instead of just one located on a specially-prepared partition

That's odd, because I thought that is exactly what it did do. Naturally the storage it uses must be specially prepared, but I didn't realise the device it is caching needed any preparation. As far as I was aware you could add devices to cache at will. To remove a device you just flushed the cache - no formatting changes required. Are you saying this isn't so?

Re:bcache

[drinkypoo]

Are you saying this isn't so?

Unless it's changed since I built it for Linux 3.5, it isn't so. You have to format the volume to be cached specially, then create partitions within that and format them.

Re:bcache

[Gaygirlie]

Absolute minimum latency for a fetch is 16ms on USB port.

If that were true there would be no USB-powered networking devices.

Re:bcache

[cthulhu11]

Linux is all about stupid anachronistic partitioning. How dare you suggest that it progress into the 1990's?

Re:bcache

[heson]

For Linux users: http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/

Please help mainline this, please.

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hybrid drives or mixed mode setups kinda suck ass now that actual ss drives are getting to a reasonable price/size.

SSD for os/programs.

Giant TB+ drive for storage and media files.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod up. Momentus XT is nice but even that will lose its edge soon enough. I bought a Z77 board with the full intention of using S.R.T. caching, but i jsut bought a 180 GB intel 330 series for $159 + tax instead. I added a 3 TB HDD and backed up all my steam games to it. Now if i want to play something I load it up from the backup in minutes. I figure this configuration isnt far removed from what the consoles do. Eventually I'll have a USM SSD hot swap bay on the front of my comp. Swap SSD's in and out like game cartridges.

Re:No.

[wbr1]

For the average joe, they dont want to have to manage putting os/apps/frequent files on one drive and split the rest elsewhere. Software that automagically does this and keeps the cache up to date is a boon for the non power user.

Re:No.

[artor3]

Bingo. I've been manually managing the shifting of files back and forth between my HDD and SSD for a couple years now, and while it's not particularly hard, it's not something I'd want to guide a non-techie through. Getting the OS on one drive and the user folders (my documents, videos, music, etc.) on the other isn't particularly well documented, and moving individual Steam games seems to require console commands, a rarity in Windows.

Even though I can manage it all myself, I would absolutely switch to having software handle it if there were a reliable, free, easy-to-use option.

Re:No.

[Lumpy]

Odd, the hybrid drive I just bought doesn't suck ass. It in fact is faster than ANY hard drive you can buy that has a 750gb size. Unless "suck ass" is the new hipster slang for "really fast". It made my old out of date quad core i5 laptop a whole lot faster.

Re:No.

[cpu6502]

I'd rather spend my money on RAM. Up the system memory from 8 GB to 32GB, and you eliminate the slowdown caused by hard drive accesses.

Re:No.

[Cinder6]

I built a system two weeks ago, and I put in a 1TB drive and a 60GB cache SSD. The SSD definitely makes certain things nice--Windows boot time is down to ~7 seconds (I don't use Intel Rapid Start), and loading games (primary purpose of this machine) is also very quick, particularly on games with long load times, such as SWTOR.

That said, for common, everyday use, SSD cache drives are kind of meh. Shaving off a second from Chrome launch time, or even 20 seconds off of Windows boot time, isn't that big a deal in the vast majority of cases. Using an SSD as your primary drive has much more immediate, obvious benefits, and if you can handle the lower storage space, then it's a good idea to go for that and get a platter drive for your DVD collection.

I will say, one nice thing about a cache drive is you don't have to worry about wear on the SSD. If the cache drive starts slowing down, you can just chuck it and get a new one without having to do any data backup/restore, and because the cache drives are small, they're under $100 to replace.

I don't know what it's like in the Linux world, but I imagine things are much better.

Re:No.

[lightknight]

Agreed. The hybrid drives arrived at the market too late. What more, the 'caching' mechanism is a bit of a joke; a smarter, but more technically complicated approach, would have been to implement two drives in one package, one flash, one standard mechanical; however, I do not know if the SATA spec is cool with that. One drive, two partitions then?

As it is right now, the lack of control over what get put on that all too small cache is killing the market for these things. Yes, your most often accessed files are supposed to be on there, no, according to reviewers, it's not happening.

Re:No.

[afidel]

I assure you that there are MANY 800 GB SAS/SATA SSD's that can beat your hybrid drive, they just cost more than most people will spend on their entire computer =)

Re:No.

[OzPeter]

Hybrid drives or mixed mode setups kinda suck ass now that actual ss drives are getting to a reasonable price/size.

SSD for os/programs.

Giant TB+ drive for storage and media files.

I have a laptop with a single drive bay you insensitive clod

Re:No.

[brantondaveperson]

boon for the non obsessive-compulsive

FTFY.

Re:No.

[SydShamino]

I have an SSD in my new work machine, with a big disc drive as D:. For this, though, it was pretty simple to install data files (p4 sync, PCB projects) on the HDD and use the SSD for OS and applications.

Re:No.

[Eskarel]

I'm sick of this myth. The math I've done indicates that, presuming that the drive is doing a halfway decent job of spreading the writes around, most cheap SSDs are rated to allow you to write the entire volume of the drive every day for about 30 years. Now personally I don't even come close to doing that, and your average physical HDD is rated for about 5 years, with 10 being a seriously long life.

If you buy a reasonable quality SSD at present your drive will not last long enough to see a significant level of NAND failure and what will kill it will be one of the million things that kills HDDs on a regular basis.

Re:No.

[FlyHelicopters]

I get you about Steam, the solution there is to just run all of Steam off a HDD and run everything else off the SSD.

My Steam folder is way too large to put onto a SSD right now anyway, darn summer sales event! :)

Most games don't care, the only games I run off an SSD are MMOs such as SWTOR, it is large enough and "busy" enough to care, but single player stuff doesn't matter.

Re:No.

[FlyHelicopters]

^ This

Also, a Quad Core i5 isn't out of date, last time I checked. :)

BTW, a pair of 512GB SSDs are no longer crazy expensive, they can be purchased for less than $1,000 total, which is less than many gamers spend on their computers.

Re:No.

[FlyHelicopters]

^ Just a caution...

Windows 7 Home won't access more than 16GB of RAM, so while I agree with you, to a point... 32GB only helps on Pro or Ultimate.

Just thought I'd mention it.

Re:No.

[DragonTHC]

I may have to look into that.

I'm using a 60GB SSD for my boot drive with a 1TB sata drive for storage.
I have anything requiring mass storage mapped via symlink to the sata drive.
steamapps, origin games, certain large program files too.

works decent enough, and faster than sata alone. Windows boots in about 15 seconds.

Re:No.

[FlyHelicopters]

^ Then how would you do a dual drive cache anyway?

These are not all in one hybrid drives you know... You still need two drive bays.

Dell makes some nice XPS 17" laptops that have dual drive bays, I have a 120GB Intel SDD in the boot slot and a 1TB HDD in the second bay. Works very nicely...

Re:No.

[TheLink]

From what I see nearly all data-loss failures in SSDs are due to bugs or faults and not due to wear.

Re:No.

[schizz69]

Assuming Windows is installed on the small 60gb SSD, change the default drive for the my pics, downloads and videos folder etc (right click the folder icon and change its location) It is not that hard, and windows handles the copying of data. I tend to leave the documents folder on the SSD as it contains the %appdata% folder by default and most people don't have more that 5gb of documents. All that said, I don't expect your grandmother to be able to do it by herself, but once it's setup, it is completely transparent to the end user.

Re:No.

[gman003]

After getting it initially set up (which was, I will concede, a pain in three hundred asses), my own dual-drive system has required me to think about which drive to put something on precisely once, when installing the Unreal Anthology off CD (which was a case of picking "D:\Unreal Anthology" instead of "C:\Unreal Anthology" when installing).

Maybe it's because I could afford an SSD big enough that I don't worry *too* much about space, and having a hard drive faster than normal (it's a 7200rpm drive in a laptop - not too common, although a bit more common than dual-drive laptops in the first place).

Re:No.

[DigiShaman]

SSDs have a propensity to just die like a normal HDD. Not sure why. Could be overheating, poor quality in materials making the ICs, buggy code in the firmware someplace. Who knows. But I've seen plenty OEM Samsung and OCZ Vertex 2 drives go tits up in a nanosecond. Either you can't read the data of the drives, or flat out wont enumerate SATA side (effectively bricked).

So why SSDs look great on paper in "theory", real-world stats say otherwise above and beyond just my own experiences.

OTOH, like the SSD crackwhore bitch that I am; once I tasted the speed of SSDs, I'll never go back. I just schedule daily backups to a standard HDD. Windows 7 Backup or Apple Time Machine for you Mac heads.

Re:No.

[DigiShaman]

Standard desktop chipsets can get real flaky with 16GB of RAM and above. So be sure you get a single Quad kit and not 2x Dual kits like most people get (because it's cheaper). But then again, if you're serious about needing that much RAM, I suggest going workstation level with an Intel Xeon or AMD chip. Those are the only to line of CPUs that will support ECC. Last thing you want to have to worry about is some bit flips happening someplace and then the corruption being committed back to disk. Ugh!!! The though alone is enough to give me ulcers. Seriously, go with ECC when working with that much memory.

Re:No.

[Sir_Sri]

That was true back when you were talking about MB numbers. It's definitely not true when talking in that rage of GB.

To use windows as an example, it will try and cache what it thinks you're going to load based on I think a fairly simple algorithm. Which means it's usually wrong. If you never access more than 32 GB worth of data from your HDD then sure, 32 GB of Ram will do the trick. But, for example, if you play WoW or SWTOR (both of which flutter around 20GB), any other game + web browser + windows you could fairly easily waltz past 32 GB of data, at which point you're into 'cache misses'. And yes, this is conceptually the exact same problem as cache hit ratios, just working at a different level (logical files or directories rather than lines of memory).

I had virtually no performance increase going from 12 to 24 GB of RAM on general disk use.

You can get a big boost from an SSD, and especially, getting something that will actually work a SATAIII connection at full speed. My x58 board is lucky to pull more than 200MB/s from even a very good SSD, whereas the same drive on a sandy bridge board will do 450-550 range.

Now keep in mind, a regular HDD is about 70MB/s for sustained data. Put that in a raid 1 (mobo hardware, or software) and you can see 120-130, so an SSD on a bad connection may not be that much better than much less expensive RAID.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Windows 7 Audit Mode to install the users folder and programdata onto a HDD and pointed the temp folders to also to run from there.
I put the page file onto another HDD that only plays media files.
Then Steam was installed to the SSD but then the main steamapps folder is symlinked back to the HDD with the users folder.
Since I hate loading times in Skyrim (especially with stacks of mods) I copied those to the SSD and symlinked them back (Symlink inside a Symlink lol).

Setup works wonderfully well, Steam starts up really fast while keeping a lot of space free on the SSD for other applications.

Complete Setup:

1x Intel 520 128GB SSD
2x WD RE4 2TB in RAID 1 (Users, Programdata, Temp and most steam data)
2x Seagate 1TB in RAID 1 (Media, Page File)

Re:No.

[tlhIngan]

Now keep in mind, a regular HDD is about 70MB/s for sustained data. Put that in a raid 1 (mobo hardware, or software) and you can see 120-130, so an SSD on a bad connection may not be that much better than much less expensive RAID.

You're ignoring a very important fact.

An SSD is at least an order of magnitude faster still because the seek time is in the microsecond range. So even an SSD on a bad interface can easily peg the interface for random I/O, while the super RAID array doing the same accesses can bog down to a halt.

The reason? Seek times. A typical hard drive is around 7ms or so, which means if you're doing lots of seeks, you'll never get that sustained transfer rate. Worst case, you can easily get less than 1MB/sec if the hard drive is reading 4kB blocks at random locations.

A hard drive is great for long reads and writes. An SSD excels at random I/O and OS/application usage tends to be random I/O. It just makes the whole system feel "snappier" purely because read requets are fulfilled immediately versus skittering the head over the platters.

In fact, Windows 7 does a quick test to determine if it's running on an SSD - it does a bunch of random I/O. If the drive is capable of more than 50MB/sec, it's an SSD because no spinning rust can meet that requirement due to seek time.

Re:No.

[Sir_Sri]

I'm well aware of seek times. And honestly, they don't matter all that much. For a very small file they take you from 1-2 seconds to effectively instant yes, but for a significant file you're throughput limiting yourself anyway.

I guess it depends on the types of files you access. If you're regularly hitting small files, seek times matter, especially large collections of smallf iles, if you're regularly hitting big files, not as much. I do a lot more with 'big' (70-100MB files) than I do with small ones.

A pair of drives in a RAID isn't as good as an SSD in performance. But for 60 bucks you still only have one blob of 1.5 TB, compared to 100 bucks for a lone SSD that would be lucky to be 120 GB. At some point you're trading your time to manage the data on your SSD versus the time to access the data on the SSD, and how much money that's worth to you.

Re:No.

[Eskarel]

Well yes, they do "just die" as do crappy hard disks.

If you happen to live in a secondary market(like Australia where I live) they die a lot because the vendors imported a bunch of crappy first gen stuff and refused to import any of the second gen stuff till they could stick enough idiots with their mistakes.

The point is that whatever problems you have with an SSD, reaching the write limit doesn't even make the list. Fried controllers, low quality materials, all the usual. Samsung make crappy drives in my experience and OCZ doesn't even seem to be able to make thumb drives that last. The Intel stuff though is pretty good.

Re:No.

[TheLink]

Seems to me the current hybrid drives don't do write-caching, they only do read-caching.

I can see why read-caching would be a lot simpler to implement, but I bet decent write-caching will really make hybrid drives as fast as SSDs for most desktop use.

Copying files from one location to another at SSD speeds till the write-cache fills up. Then while you do something else the drive flushes the cache to disk.

Re:No.

[TheLink]

If it were up to me I'd cache the stuff that would make the disk head seek the most, and not cache sequential access (unless it happens often enough).

You don't cache stuff that goes: seek 1 millisecond, then sequential read for 10 seconds.You cache stuff that goes seek 1 millisecond, sequential read 5 milliseconds seek 1 millisecond, sequential read 10 milliseconds.

Cache the small stuff, and cache some filesystem metadata at higher priority. 20 years ago I wrote disk caching software to do similar stuff for the Apple IIGS. I think the hybrid drives better do something more intelligent than mere read caching, or most people aren't going to bother.

With all the genius programmers they have, they should use an algorithm that understands _time_ so if the drive is spending lots of time waiting to write/read something to/from the disk, then it should try to cache it. Maybe have a drive mood or something - so if the drive is waiting more, it mood changes to "cache more current stuff", otherwise it goes to "cache less of current stuff".

Re:No.

[TheLink]

SSD on laptop.
1Gbps LAN
RAID10 NAS (e.g. 4 x 2TB SATA).

Linux does RAID10 NAS pretty well, if it's always on, you do get full 1Gbps from stuff cached in RAM.

Copy the stuff you need to the laptop before your plane trip or whatever.

Re:No.

[PReDiToR]

You need one of these than.
They aren't all perfect, but duct tape and superglue will help you out with the faceplate.

Re:No.

[isorox]

I'm well aware of seek times. And honestly, they don't matter all that much. For a very small file they take you from 1-2 seconds to effectively instant yes, but for a significant file you're throughput limiting yourself anyway.

The problem comes when you try to read a small file while reading the large file. If you want to preview 1,000 files (say thumbnails for a directory full of pictures), that's 1000 reads. At 10ms each (hdd), that's 10 seconds. At 10ns each (ssd), that's 10ms.

Sure, keep your read-only media on a large hard drive, as you'll tend to be pulling it off as a single stream, with only one open file, but keep the majority of your files on an SSD.

Re:No.

[Neil Boekend]

Sata 2 spec is cool with that. It allows for port multipliers(Warning, I do not know that brand. It may be crap, it may be gold. It's just the first thing I found). However: during the 10 sec Google quest I found some chipsets have trouble with it. Intel was quoted as having trouble with it.

Re:No.

[Dot.Com.CEO]

The Windows algorithm is anything but simple. It's actually quite damn good, and the system is measurably faster while using Readyboost.

Re:No.

[jtownatpunk.net]

It's getting closer but there's still a gap. It's about $0.20/gig vs $1.00/gig for the 3rd gen Seagate vs. SSDs that can do 500/500 mb/sec read/write. That's rounding hybrid up and SSD down. You're talking 5x cost for a similar amount of storage.

Re:No.

[Skal Tura]

not just for joe averages, even for some power users who need the giant storage but also the speed.

In the past i've solved this by RAIDing multiple magnetic drives, but now i got couple 128Gb Kingstons sitting on my table for next upgrade of my workstation, going to through out the 6 magnetic drives and replace them with 2xSSD + 2x2Tb WD blacks. or maybe 4x2Tb WD Blacks.

2x128Gb on RAID0 is still a bit smallish for me, but i'm going to try it out (virtual machines for development) if i can survive with just that amount of fast storage. then again, 2x2Tb WD Blacks ain't exactly slow neither.

Re:No.

[Terrasque]

I added a 3 TB HDD and backed up all my steam games to it. Now if i want to play something I load it up from the backup in minutes.

Fancy. I usually just click on the "Play game" button ;)

But, on a more serious note. You can set up Intel SRT for 18gb (or 64gb - aka Intel's "full drive" option) of your SSD, and only use that part to accelerate the HDD. You still got the rest for "Data" - which can also be used to install and run Windows from. I know, I set that exact solution up less than a week ago :)

It's a bit tricky, and might require some reinstall though, so maybe not a practical solution for you.

Basically the steps are :
1. Set Intel disk controller to raid in bios
2. Set up Cache on SSD - this have to be done from a Windows installation, but that windows can not be run from the SSD
3. The part of the SSD which isn't configured as Cache is set up as a Data partition. Which can be used to install Windows on.

Re:No.

[PhunkySchtuff]

I'm well aware of seek times. And honestly, they don't matter all that much.

Dude, that's the most incorrect statement I've heard in a long time. It's raw data transfer rate that matters less. Nearly every kind of workload your computer will experience is comprised of lots of random I/O. More so if the disk is fragmented. If you've got big files on your system, they're more than likely fragmented.

Now, come back to us when you've used a computer with a SSD and let us know what your experience was like.

A SSD is one component that can take an otherwise average computer and have it feeling quick and snappy again for the end user. Benchmarks don't tell the whole story.

Re:No.

[jkflying]

With the latest firmware OCZ seem to have sorted their dead drives problem out. Of course, now that they're moving away from the Sandforce controllers it will only get better. And you're not the only one in a secondary market, South Africa is just as bad. I still managed to get a Vertex3 for my laptop though... it even came with the latest firmware flashed.

Re:No.

[drsmithy]

I'm well aware of seek times. And honestly, they don't matter all that much.

Uh, what ? Latency is probably the single most important aspect of storage.

For a very small file they take you from 1-2 seconds to effectively instant yes, but for a significant file you're throughput limiting yourself anyway.

The problem is that most file accesses are "very small".

I do a lot more with 'big' (70-100MB files) than I do with small ones.

Then you're vastly better off with an SSD on, say, a SATA1 interface than you would be any mechanical drive on a SATA3 interface, from a performance perspective. Heck, even the fastest mechanical drives have only recently started to exceed SATA1 speeds with any sort of consistency.

Re:No.

[AmiMoJo]

They don't cache writes because the drives are designed to be readable even if the SSD part fails. Everything on SSD must also be on the HDD, otherwise it could be lost.

Re:No.

[SpinyNorman]

Not just for power users ...

In Linux it's simple enough to, say, mount your root (OS data) folder on an SSD and /home (user data) on a HDD, but Windows 7 isn't so flexible.

What most people (power users) end up doing under Windows 7 is to install the OS on an SSD, then use a "junction point" (cf Linux hard link) to redirect the /Users folder to a HDD (and reconfigure the Windows TEMP directory to be on the HDD to avoid killing the SSD with excessive temp file create/delete cycles). The trouble with this is that Windows 7 junction points don't play nice with restore points, as you'll find out when having to revert to a restore point and all your user data disappears requiring major hackery to restore.

So, for Windows 7, a HDD with built in flash cache is a MUCH more convenient solution than using a separate SDD - even for a power user.

Re:No.

[k_187]

SRT will cache windows files. The best use of it is to just buy a 64gb drive and use the whole thing for caching. I'm currently doing just that and for things on the drive, it runs just like having an SSD. I can tell when I go back to a game I've not played in a while and it has to pull the data off the HD, but after that first load, all the same. Stuff like windows and chrome don't get pushed off because I'm always using them.

Re:No.

[Terrasque]

I'm well aware of seek times. And honestly, they don't matter all that much.

Well... No. A lot of programs have random read patterns, and seek times are incredibly important in those cases. You also got multitasking, which often involves several programs reading / writing on different parts of the disk.

Here are some comparisons I found on YT:

  * Some game loading times comparison - Varies from 10-20% to almost 3 times as fast.

  * More game load times

  * A rather extreme comparison between standard 5400rpm laptop disk and a SSD

  * Cold boot + starting of a bunch of apps

And here you have some videos of starting World of Warcraft, widely known for its random access when loading:

  * SSD vs RAID0

  * SSD vs HDD

For some tasks, SSD is just on a different planet compared to HDD. As long as the data can be read serially HDD is good enough, and RAID0 HDD's can approach a single SSD in performance. But when you need random reads (which happens when starting windows, starting apps, multitasking, and with not-so-greatly-written programs) SSD is a different beast entirely.

Why do people buy better CPU's and more RAM? Most do it to cut down on the time they have to sit and wait on the computer. SSD's can cut that a lot. Really a lot.

In some ways it's like comparing a P4 Willamette 2ghz with a modern Core i7 - yes, base clock speed is "just" ~1.5-2 times faster, but the better architecture, more cores, things like turbo and working HT makes it a completely different beast.

Re:No.

[davidbrit2]

But I've seen plenty OEM Samsung and OCZ Vertex 2 drives go tits up in a nanosecond.

Funny you should mention that. I've got an OCZ Vertex 2 sitting on my desk right now, because it won't identify itself to the BIOS (or do much of anything else either)...

I gave up on that, and just stuffed in an 8 GB SATA SSD, dedicated it to ReadyBoost, and called it a day.

Re:No.

[Rockoon]

Yes, your most often accessed files are supposed to be on there, no, according to reviewers, it's not happening.

This is the wrong metric to be using anyways, so that its not happening is probably not an issue. Just because something is more frequently accessed than something else that does not mean that the benefit of having it on the L2 is also larger.

The goal is supposed to be to maximize the time that there are no outstanding I/O requests at all, not simply to minimize the latency of the most frequent I/O requests.

Frequency of Access is just a blunt heuristic that poorly approximates the goal. Its like trying to find the global minima without even using the local gradients.

Re:No.

[Miamicanes]

> SSDs have a propensity to just die like a normal HDD.

No, normal drives tend to become flaky, then get super-slow, then start to make grinding noises and die outright a short time later. SSDs just commit data-suicide, then go into "panic" mode and lock the entire drive if they sense that you're trying to do data recovery on them. Ask anybody unfortunate enough to own a drive based on the Sandforce SF-1200 controller, like the OCZ Velocity2. OCZ's forums are *littered* with post after post after post (continuing to the present) from people who've had the drive just spontaneously decide to fail.

The problem isn't flash-wear... the problem is a perfect storm of buggy firmware, drive-level encryption, and paranoid firmware that views aggressive attempts to recover data lost due to that buggy firmware as a hacking attempt & locks out the entire drive in a way that can't be fixed by end users (mostly, because Sandforce won't allow the recovery/repair tools to be released to end users). IMHO, it's completely inexcusable. At the VERY least, they should have made the encryption and protection something that can be disabled by end users (probably requiring complete reformatting, but at least present as an option). Then, they could have made a recovery mode that allows drives that had the encryption disabled to just sequentially rip the raw bits from the flash for offline recovery. But no. They have to protect their shit IP that nobody who's been burned by them will EVER purchase again anyway, and casually write off petabytes of lost user data due to their brittle embedded firmware and protection as "not our problem".

OCZ and Sandforce are the best poster children for a class-action lawsuit since the day HP decided to sell CD writers without cache (that their engineers GUARANTEED would turn at least a quarter of the discs they touched into coasters). The sad part is that such a suit could only have things like piddling amounts of money as the penalty, instead of compelling Sandforce to furnish all source, signing keys, and in-house utilities relevant to the SF-1200 to anybody who's ever had the misfortune of purchasing a drive based on it.

Re:No.

[Miamicanes]

^^^ Argh. Vertex2, not Velocity2.

Re:No.

[cpu6502]

>>>To use windows as an example, it will try and cache what it thinks you're going to load based on I think a fairly simple algorithm.

In that case I would turn off the HDD caching. We didn't have it prior to circa 1995, or in the modern day Puppy GNU/linux, and it worked/works just fine. I'd run everything out of the 32 gigs of RAM.

Re:No.

[Spencer Drager]

Depends on how much you want to spend on storage.

I spent $80 on a 64gb SSD and I use it with SRT as a cache for my 2TB HDD. I have a lot of programs and games. It's easy to fill up a 200GB SSD with games, applications, and windows, and you shouldn't fill it past 80% anyway.

For less than half the cost, I get to have the SSD feel for *everything*. I also don't have to spend any time to manage it. Do I care what data is where? No. Just put it on my large drive and it works. Tests have shown that SSD caching provides very similar performance to a dedicated SSD, and I notice it. I would definitely recommend anyone to give it a try.

Re:No.

[Spencer Drager]

I have the same setup -- 64gb SSD. When I first used it I was astonished at just how fast it is with cache. Boot faster, load games faster. I don't know why anyone who has alot of apps would want to spend their time/worry about managing files on each disk.

Re:No.

[DigiShaman]

Yup. Hence "AMD" and not just a specific lineup. Intel (from a business model, not a technical reason) purposefully segments their market. Only Xeon chips support ECC regardless of what the chipset on a motherboard is capable of.

Re:No.

[DeadCatX2]

Windows 7 supports symbolic links, which are better than junction points IMO.

I bought an SSD for loading my Steam games, but I don't want the whole Steam folder there because it's not big enough for all the games, and you can't split the Steam folder into two places. So I move my common games to the SSD (along with all the GCF files), and then create symbolic links on the HDD that point to the SSD folder. It works perfectly, all reads/writes for that folder are directed to the SSD even though they appear to be on the HDD.

I also didn't want the Windows folder on the SSD, because I'm too lazy to migrate the folder, and I was worried about the SSD potentially dying and making a hassle for me (it appears SSDs have a not insignificant failure rate around the one month mark, based on reviews I was reading). Most of the time my laptop is asleep anyway, so I don't see any performance benefit to booting.

While it's not the easiest thing to do out-of-the-box, there is a free tool that creates explorer context menus to make the creation of symbolic links brain-dead easy (right-click drag-and-drop, "create symbolic link", done).

Re:No.

[dgatwood]

I think what you're missing is that the things SSDs excel at are things that people do infrequently. I boot at most weekly, at least monthly. I launch a couple of apps in any given day that haven't been launched recently enough to still be in the cache. So for all practical purposes, the improvement from removing the seek overhead isn't that important.

BTW, if multitasking causes a huge speed hit because of your disk performance, that usually means you don't have enough RAM. Just saying. :-)

Re:No.

[dinfinity]

Are you suggesting that I exchange my computer for a pair of SSDs?

Re:No.

[Solandri]

OTOH, like the SSD crackwhore bitch that I am; once I tasted the speed of SSDs, I'll never go back. I just schedule daily backups to a standard HDD. Windows 7 Backup or Apple Time Machine for you Mac heads.

If you're worried about SSD reliability, don't do a backup. Do a partition clone. When I first got an SSD, I did what everyone else did - shrink my existing Windows partition to where it fit on the SSD, then clone it to the SSD. I was then about to delete the boot partition on the HDD and use the entire drive for data, when I had an epiphany. Just leave the boot partition on the HDD, and clone the SSD's sole partition to it once a day as a backup.

This means if the SSD ever fails, you don't have to do anything. The computer can boot off the HDD as if you'd never installed the SSD. When you get the warranty replacement SSD in the mail, you can install it and clone the HDD's boot sectors and boot partition to the SSD again, and you're back in business. Testing the backup becomes a simple matter of holding down F9 (or whatever key your motherboard uses to select boot device), and booting off the HDD.

Once I realized this, I started buying the fast but cheap-because-of-bad-reputation Sandforce SSDs for customers. I set up their computers like this, and an SSD failure becomes a non-event. It just means their computer slows down to HDD speeds for about a week until the warranty replacement SSD arrives.

Re:No.

[spire3661]

I really like the direction you went. What tools are you using to make a partition clone on windows? I have Acronis TIH 2011, but its awful outside of the boot disks it makes. As it stands now, with the toolkit I have, making clones still requires user interaction, Id like to automate the cloning process to a daily job.

Re:No.

[spire3661]

Momentus XT is fast, but its not THAT fast. In real world transfers iv topped it out at 90 MB/s. While that is pretty respectable for a mechanical laptop drive, its not that impressive anymore. It barely beats out my 8 year old 76 GB 10K RPM Raptor.

Re:No.

[spire3661]

Why would a workstation need ECC? Oh thats right, it doesnt.

Re:No.

[Terrasque]

Random reads / writes are all but infrequent. Right now I have running :
  * Chrome with a bazillion threads running various plugins
  * Pidgin
  * Skype
  * Steam - updating a game
  * VirtualBox Ubuntu dev box
  * VirtualBox WinXP test box
  * Dropbox
  * Antivirus

Not to mention Windows itself, which are always touching and prodding files. Each on their own might just do a few reads / writes here and there, but put them together and you got a steady stream of random reads and writes going on. At the moment I have on average 100kB/s random disk chatter, occasionally spiking to a few MB/s.

As for RAM. I got 16gb of them. 1 GB is used only for Chrome. 1 GB for each VirtualBox. Each VBox instance got a 10GB disk. The WinXP test disk got snapshots, which generates more files, and more random reads / writes. Not to mention most of the games are in the 5-15GB range, and the MMO's I love to test are frequently in the 20-40GB range.

What's infrequent are in fact those times where a hard disk can, without interruption, read several MB's in a stream. Without having to detour to write some bytes here, or read a few bytes there. RAM is good, but it's not a golden bullet by far. I'd need over 32GB ram to have RAM cache be fully effective. If it was perfect, that is. It's not. For the price of 32 GB ram I could buy a decent 256GB SSD, which would be MUCH more handy. For going above 32GB ram, I'd probably need a very expensive motherboard with more than 4 ram slots, and then buy the actual RAM on top of that. For that kind of money you can buy a Fucking Big SSD (TM).

SSD's beautifully removes the modern computer's achilles heel, the HDD's extremely slow disk I/O. The last 10-15 years disk performance speed have just about doubled. A decent SSD quadruples streamed data speed, and when it comes to IOPS it goes from maybe 100-150 to ~50.000-100.000 - that's a mindblowingly huge difference! Not only does things start faster, but those small hiccups programs have when waiting for some I/O operation are just *poof* gone. Does not exist anymore. That small lag when clicking something and wondering if it actually registered, scrolling a document and see it stop for a second here and there.. Those small things.. Gone. So not only does it on average cut the time I sit waiting on the PC in half on the big stuff, all those small annoying time thieves have disappeared. It feels .. different. Hard to explain, really. The best I can explain it is the feeling you get, after having your foot damaged, and have had to go for months (well, in the PC case.. years) with the damage, you've gotten used to it so much that you hardly notice it anymore. You get slightly better as time goes by, but it's only minor improvements. Then suddenly one day, the foot is perfectly fine. You can walk normally again. It feels strange to do it. That's the feeling I get with a SSD compared to HDD system. At first it feels strange, almost like something missing, but then you get used to it. And now, going back to HDD is no longer an option anymore.

Oookay, that was a huge wall of text with what's probably nonsense for many. Nevertheless, maybe someone out there can understand.

Re:No.

[TheLink]

You get more bang for your buck with read caching (more activities read from disk than write to it)

Even if you have 10 times more reads than writes, if your reads can be done at 50000/sec but your writes can only be done at 200-1000/sec (1-5 ms access time), then your writes remain a noticeable bottleneck.

And If you're still using XP you might be interested to read this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc959914.aspx
For every scan of a directory (even cached) XP by default will WRITE to the drive just to update the last access timestamps!

Linux had that problem too but see noatime and relatime.

Re:No.

[Sir_Sri]

It depends very much on your usage scenario. I said myself I have a 240 gig SSD. I just don't get a lot out of it because most of what I do is large files with programs that I opened a week ago. Speeding up how fast windows does things that don't impact the user experience doesn't matter to me, but it really depends on what you're doing what things will matter to the user experience.

Re:No.

[Sir_Sri]

A raid 0 HDD is, at best going to be like half an SSD in performance, but it's a lot less money.

And yes, I write games for a living, and games *do* load faster from an SSD. But it depends on the game, and whether or not windows has cached it. My perennial favourites (that I didn't work on) the hearts of iron/victoria/europa universalis games all benefit a lot from an SSD on startup time, but they're all pretty small (under a gig each without mods) so they tend to stay in RAM cache, so the 'load time' benefit is only seen once after a reboot.

Something like WoW or SWTOR, well, it depends. My SSD is certainly faster than my HDD. The question is, when it's about 2x the throughput is it more than 2x as fast due to latency reduction? And the answer is..... no. Those two are mostly throughput limited. So yes, a SSD at 400MB/s will completely blow away even a 5 disk RAID 5 setup, but it's not the latency making the difference.

Again, depends what you do. If you play both WoW and SWTOR, and my aforementioned paradox titles then sure, you could daily see a benefit from the SSD latency difference, but that's still mostly overshadowed by it having easily double the throughput of a cheap raid.

Why do people buy better CPU's and more RAM? Most do it to cut down on the time they have to sit and wait on the computer. SSD's can cut that a lot. Really a lot.

yes, I'm not saying SSD's aren't better than traditional HDD's. They're even better than most raid setups. It's that they aren't enough better for every problem to justify the cost and the hassle of managing one small drive and one big drive. Depends on what you do.

Re:No.

[Sir_Sri]

People actually use readyboost? For what? I guess if you have a gig of ram you might, but otherwise readboost won't ever do anything for you. That's kind of the thrust of some of the SSD tools is to use them as a fast cache (like readyboost but at the HDD rather than RAM level), and that's not a bad idea. I believe windows 8 was going to support that natively.

But the windows caching algorithm seems to just be that it holds the last X GB of data in ram and doesn't ever actually guess what you're going to use next. it might just be that mine can't guess accurately because I use a lot of different stuff, but the algorithm seems pretty simplistic.

Re:No.

[DigiShaman]

Actually, what would be better is to mirror both the SSD and HDD in one RAID1 volume. Then designate the SSD as the primary read/write target with the HDD left to keep up on the write-back transactions at its own pace. Not sure if any RAID controllers are smart enough to do this automatically by not letting the slowest drive slow the entire RAID1 volume down. In theory, you could achieve by making both the SSD and HDD Dymanic disks under Windows and then create an NTFS mirror across both drive. Leaving the SSD as the primary boot disk in the first channel. If anyone has done this, let me know. Otherwise, testing is required with different types of RAID1 configurations (hardware, software, or at the OS level).

Essentially, an SSD cache does something similar from a performance point of view. But it's only a cache and not an entire real-time mirror of data.

Re:No.

[Terrasque]

Something like WoW or SWTOR, well, it depends. My SSD is certainly faster than my HDD. The question is, when it's about 2x the throughput is it more than 2x as fast due to latency reduction? And the answer is..... no. Those two are mostly throughput limited. So yes, a SSD at 400MB/s will completely blow away even a 5 disk RAID 5 setup, but it's not the latency making the difference.

Interesting example there, especially WoW. I have some experience with that program. Let's see what challenge that game actually has when it comes to disk access..

When I played, I, as most of the players, had my base in Dalaran. That was the hub of the whole world, for both sides. It was not uncommon to see hundreds of people there at busy times. Let's say I logged in at such a busy time..

First of all, the game has to load the static level assets, and GUI assets. These can reasonably be optimized for sequential reading. Then comes the player characters.. Each player can have different hair models and textures, skin textures, head models and textures. Then comes gear. There are 6 different rendered armor slots (head, torso, shoulders, legs, hands, feet), plus up to two weapons (and enchantment particle effects). I'll assume that each gear have 1 model + 1 texture, There will also be some overlap, but not much (mostly for models I guess). With 200 players, that's (7 * 2 * 200 / 2 ~> 7 * 200) around 1400 random reads for gear alone, allowing a very generous /2 overlap. Then comes characters themselves. Hard to guess, but on average 2-3 access per player maybe? Let's say 2. 1400 + 400 = 1800. Great, then comes the fluff. Mounts, pets, mini pets, and so on.. Sound assets for some of the items, too (especially mounts and minipets). I think we easily cross 2000 random reads on players alone. Then you got mods + mod assets + mod data (which has a braindead implentation). You also got spell icons, item icons, minimap symbols +++

Let's guesstimate a lowball of 2500 random reads required to load WoW Dalaran in rush hour (but could probably double that). Wikipedia gives a number of 9ms average seek time for a common desktop drive, so let's run with that (12-15ms for laptop drives). 9ms * 2500 = 22.5 seconds. That means that the disk will spend almost half a minute JUST on seeking, not including transferring the data. Compare that to an SSD, which Wikipedia says "Typical SSDs will have a seek time between 0.08 and 0.16 ms."

2500 * 0.16ms = 0.4 seconds. A slow SSD does in half a second what a decent HDD would have to work half a minute on. And we haven't taken into consideration actually moving the data, NCQ, fragmentation, and other read / write requests from background tasks (antivirus, windows pagefile, windows logging, web browser, IM client, Skype, Steam, WoW logging +++) - remember, it does not have to generate any amount of data, we're just talking about seek's here. Writing or reading 1 byte is quite enough.

In one of the links from the post you answered on they show a comparison between a 2-disk HDD RAID0 and an SSD. You can see already on the 10 second mark that all the assets are loaded for the SSD, while the RAID is still struggling on the 40 second mark (and you see the last of the assets around him popping in around the 45sec mark). That is a bit beyond your 2x increase, and I suspect that even a 4-disk HDD raid0 would lose against the SSD there.

Re:No.

[Eskarel]

Things have gotten a lot better lately, but local retailers restricted themselves to the first gen stock for more than a year after some of the better replacements started appearing. That first batch of Intel drives just never even made it here.

Re:No.

[LordDfg]

The name of the software or a link would be helpful.

Re:No.

[jaymemaurice]

To be fair, OCZ has some pretty decent customer service. I had neumerous OCZ drives fail, one while I was over-seas which they still RMAd - they have always been supportive of their product and shipped replacements quickly. I mean, if it were any other company, they would have cocked up and lost my business. But that said, I'll still never buy another sandforce based SSD again.

Re:No.

[jaymemaurice]

So what does the raid controller do when you re-write the same block multiple times... how do you ensure the drive is in a consistant state?!

I don't think you can do RAID1 with a fast drive and a slow drive.

Re:No.

[jaymemaurice]

But your raptor still wont fit in a laptop!

Re:No.

[badkarmadayaccount]

SATA allows port multipliers.

I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[Billly Gates]

While the apps run on the hard drive due to the low capacity. To me it is not worth it to watch your os boot faster. Windows 7 loads in about 35 seconds on my computer which is only a Phenom II and not a fancy i7 or anything.

What also is not addressed in the article is the reliability of the SSDs. Flash ram is not a permanent solution and will die due to the limited number of writes. If you use mysql or MS access or run low on space and use XP that thing will be dead in a matter of months. It can only handle so much paging and writes before it dies. Tricks in the firmware move the write bits to random places in memory to prevent this but as it fills up the paging needs to keep to keep hiting the same memory addresses.

I am going to wait for a few years until they use a different memory technology that can have unlimited writes as well as larger capacities. It is not worth it to me yet.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[pla]

To me it is not worth it to watch your os boot faster.

First of all, putting the OS on a disk by itself doesn't only mean that Windows runs faster - The OS reads and writes to its files on a near continuous basis. For years before SSDs, we've known that simply getting that activity segregated onto its own disk, away from "real" file activity, gives a decent performance boost across the board; moving it to an ultra-fast random-access media helps even more (and even if you don't care about boot time, how about "responsiveness"? Every time Windows needs to wait for some stupid little icon to load, you need to wait for Windows to wait for some stupid little icon to load).

Second, SSDs have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper. You no longer need to decide between spending a fortune or segregating your apps out; a $60 SSD will hold the OS and every app you could ever possibly run, with plenty of room to spare. Yes, you'll still want that second big-slow-and-cheap HDD for general purpose storage, but you haven't needed to carefully weigh "on which disk should I install this program" for at least a year.


Flash ram is not a permanent solution and will die due to the limited number of writes.

And you think a drive with actual moving parts will live forever?


Make no mistake, SSDs have their flaws, and cost definitely still counts as one of them. But once you really use a system set up with SSD system / HDD data, you'll never even consider going back. And mere boot time has nothing to do with it.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[cdrudge]

What also is not addressed in the article is the reliability of the SSDs. Flash ram is not a permanent solution and will die due to the limited number of writes. If you use mysql or MS access or run low on space and use XP that thing will be dead in a matter of months. It can only handle so much paging and writes before it dies. Tricks in the firmware move the write bits to random places in memory to prevent this but as it fills up the paging needs to keep to keep hiting the same memory addresses.

There are a variety of different ongoing tests to look at how long drives actually last. Looking at a fairly standard older Intel 320 40GB drive, it went 190TB written before the MWI threshold was reached, and continued on until 685TB. That means it completely rewrote the drive 17500+ times.

No, it won't last forever. And it's not ideally suited for every single industry and use. But for the typical user, they are more likely to need a larger drive or otherwise upgrade then wear out the drive.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[dbIII]

Two things.
It's truly depressing that 35 seconds to use is considered fast on any system. Solaris got the nickname "slowaris" for that sort of behaviour. I don't work with win7 much, but I'm pretty sure I've never set up a win7 system that took that long to start up - turn off bonzi buddy or whatever crapware is doing stupid time wasting shit on startup.
The second thing is those "few years" have already happened and the answer was wear levelling on the SSD drives, which is more then just a "trick".

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[jedidiah]

> And you think a drive with actual moving parts will live forever?

Compared to how long SSDs have been in wide use, there are plenty of hard drives with "actual moving parts" that have lived forever.

However, the key thing is that you get some warning with a hard drive rather than it being sudden death.

Some SSD brands make Seagate seem reliable in comparison.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[gman003]

I do OS + most programs.

I have a mostly-vanilla Windows install on my SSD (I have a partition waiting for Linux, but I haven't found the time for it yet). The only change was moving \Users\GMan and \Steam over to a hard drive. C:\Users\GMan is now a symlink to the same on D: - I had tried it moving all of \Users, but that borked Windows so bad I had to reinstall. And now there's a backup user account, so if my HDD fails I can still at least log in.

Should I ever get Linux installed, I'll probably make /home/gman a symlink to D:\Users\GMan, so all my documents are literally in the same place.

It gives high performance on all my applications - even LibreOffice and GIMP start in a reasonable amount of time. But all my bulky stuff (documents, videos, games (often 10+GB apiece)) are stored on the cheap drive (my few non-Steam games were also installed there). So I'm never cramped - my SSD has 75 of its 96GB partition free, and my HDD has 400 of it's 680gb free (the Windows recovery partition is also on there, just in case the SSD fails).

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[steelfood]

I believe this is the solution you're looking for. The SSD is only used as a cache, which means that only the files that are read a lot get copied over to the SSD, and are read from the SSD automatically. Ideally, this means that the number of writes is minimal (if the files stored are the ones you constantly use, then they should only be written to the disk the first time and read from it subsequently). A database would never be in your cache, unless it's primarily used for retrieving data (reporting), rather than storing data (transactional).

You get the speed up of SSDs. You get the reliability of platters. You don't need to pay top dollar (unless the programs you normally execute take several GBs worth of space each). Your SSD won't fail due to excessive writes nearly as quickly. At least, that's the ideal. The implementation may not work exactly this way.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[John Bokma]

http://maxschireson.com/2011/04/21/debunking-ssd-lifespan-and-random-write-performance-concerns/ No idea how correct this is, but I bookmarked this over a year ago.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[EnsilZah]

Oh come on, dead in a manner of months?
What crevice of your personal biology are you pulling that number out of?
Presumably you haven't even used one yourself based on what you're writing.
If you're writing enough to your SSD to make any significant dent in its lifespan you're probably running some sort of heavy server and should probably get a more expensive SSD that's suited for that purpose.
SSDs come with extra space (I think like 7-10%) so wear leveling still has some safety room when the drive is full (though personally I'd never reach the point where my main system drive is full anyway, SSD or HDD).
And sure they'll die eventually but so will any other hardware, motors wear out, capacitors leak, fans die.
From personal experience and data from the likes of AnandTech an SSD is going to fail long after it's been made obsolete by several generations of larger, cheaper, faster drives and you'll be able to monitor its wear level.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[FlyHelicopters]

Buy Intel SSDs, run Intel's SSD Toolbox, which gives you a running count of the drive life. BTW, I've had a X25-G2 160GB drive in my machine for 2 years running Windows, this is my daily machine. It still has 97% life left on it. Flash write lifetime is not an issue for most users.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[stewbacca]

...there are plenty of hard drives with "actual moving parts" that have lived forever.

Hmmm, been using 'puters since 1984 and still haven't found one that has a hard drive that, a) lived forever, or b) gave me a warning before it died a horrible death.

Seriously awful technology that is long overdue for an overhaul.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[0123456]

Or buy an Intel 310 (I think? it's the one I have in my home server) SSD which would randomly boot up claiming to be 8MB and require a secure wipe to recover.

Hopefully the firmware update fixed that one.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[Falconhell]

Just had to replace a failed runcore ssd after only 2 years, rather disappointed.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[Trogre]

All of them, once they get full.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[kermidge]

On older Win systems I found using erunt with ntregopt along with pagedefrag from sysinternals generally worked well, and erunt was one of the first things I installed on my Win7 box.

Several times over the years erunt registry backups saved me some grief as well (but backing up hives on boot adds a wee bit to the boot time.)

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[Bengie]

1MB/s will only take 30 years!

256GB
assume 20% over-provisioning
307.2GB * 3000 writes = 921,600GB
921,600 * 1024 = 943,718,400MB
943,718,400 / 3600(hours) / 24(days) / 365 (years) = 29.925years

With all programs opened, HD IO is closer to low 10s of KB/sec, not MB. Most of my IO is network traffic.

After a year of randomly benchmarking my SSD, having to reinstall Windows and 100GB of games a few times due to mistakes, it still is at 0% worn. At this relatively heavy usage rate, it will take more than 100 years to burn it out.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[Hamsterdan]

Most drives have some amount of cells for wear-leveling and Idle garbage collection that are not available to the OS. Mine has 8GB. If it doesn't, just leave a couple GB of unpartionned space.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[TheRealMindChild]

Your argument is a bug from YEARS ago, patched by a firmware YEARS ago?

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[TheLink]

I'd thought they would move stuff around when that happens ( and that's why performance goes down if you don't have trim and the drive doesn't know which blocks can be overwritten without moving them).

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[Sir_Sri]

You're missing out then. I picked up a 240 GB ocz vertex 3 for 180 bucks, and in the right MOBO (one that can actually do full speed) it makes a huge difference to the user experience.

I had a 120 GB SSD, and ya, that, between development tools, windows, office productivity and 1 game (whichever game I was playing the most) I was chronically pushing my luck on space. 240 is enough that it behaves pretty well. I don't use it for a 'data' drive, for that I use a RAID 1 traditional drive, which is a combination of capacity and convenience. It's not all that hard to replace anything on the drive if it fails (reinstall from disks, copy over a directory from another machine), and the boost in day to day performance on web browsers, office tools etc. makes a big difference. Not because waiting 10 seconds to load Word or Powerpoint or whatever should actually be a problem, but after about 3 seconds I've opened a web browser and started reading /. and reddit etc. and then commending on /. and then 10 minutes later I've wasted 9 minutes and 53 seconds because of an extra 7 second loading time.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[Sir_Sri]

I've got a pair of windows 7 machines, a windows 8 machine and a pair of ubuntu machines between me and the GF. When you factor in the 10 or 15 seconds it can take for the bios to do its thing, and then you need to login, 35 seconds from cold isn't really very long. On my x58 based system the best I can do is 19 seconds from cold to windows 7 fully started, including typing my password. Of that about 10 is purely bios stuff. I haven't timed out ubuntu, but it's not much different with SSD's from windows 7. Windows 8 is a tiny bit faster, but on a machine with a bios it's not much different.

If you want to load a desktop full of icons, and power on all of the various USB and networked devices I have (and discover all of those), and then have any sort of graphical UI, language packs etc on a high res display there isn't much you can do to make things blazing fast other than improve the HDD speed.

In the old days when you had lower res displays, less graphical clutter (sorry, themes), less stuff trying to be automatically discovered on both your computer and network it could be faster. But for the vast majority of people an extra second or two to automatically discover the printer, the media server, to scan all the USB devices and so on before giving them the chance to do stuff is better than having them try and load it all real time. We didn't start throwing in multiple gigabytes of memory to not use it.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[slashmydots]

The boot times are obnoxiously long on my very new PC with a 1TB spinning drive :( but I've also heard of people adding a tiny little 30-60GB high read speed, low write speed SSD like a Crucial M4 as a secondary drive to install just games directly to. You want to see DDO and Skyrim load and skin stuff fast? It's incredibly simple that way! Plus, it's all read operations so the drive won't be "written to death."

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[whoever57]

Hmmm, been using 'puters since 1984 and still haven't found one that has a hard drive that, a) lived forever, or b) gave me a warning before it died a horrible death.

Then you haven't been monitoring the SMART data for reallocated sectors and self-test failures. Either that, you have been very unlucky.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[obarthelemy]

You don't play games do you ? 60GB holds maybe one ? My 120GB is full to the brim with 2.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[0123456]

last year is years ago?

Indeed. The drive didn't even exist 'years ago'.

Someone below posted a similar bug with a different model of SSD. 'Update the firmware' seems to be a regular occurrence once you start using SSDs; so far I've never had to update the firmware on a hard drive.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[obarthelemy]

plus I don't boot that often any more, maybe once a month ? There rest is Sleep or Hibernate, which is very fast anyway.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[stewbacca]

You are right. I haven't been doing shit because for my $1000-ish dollars, I expect shit to just work.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[teh dave]

However, the key thing is that you get some warning with a hard drive rather than it being sudden death.

That is not correct, and is a non-argument. Sometimes you get some warning with a hard drive rather than sudden death, sometimes you do not. The frequency of drive death occurring suddenly rather than over time will vary with personal experience, but regardless: if you value your data, then you should never just assume that a drive will give you warning before your data suddenly disappears into the void!

Some SSD brands make Seagate seem reliable in comparison.

Compared to what other brand - Samsung? WD? Toshiba? I know of no data which suggests that one popular brand's modern drives are any more or less reliable than that of any other. These days, they are all about the same. Any preference or suggestions that I've seen for one brand or another are based purely on anecdote. Case in point: just over a month ago, I had my second drive failure in two months, and they were both WDs - Caviar Blacks, no less. One of them had been going strong for almost two years before it failed. The only sensible thing to do is distrust all storage, no matter the brand, and keep backups (and plenty of them).

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[whoever57]

You are right. I haven't been doing shit because for my $1000-ish dollars, I expect shit to just work.

How do you expect your hard drives to tell you that they are going to fail? Poke a little flag out of the PC's case? Is that your idea of "just work"?

Or is your beef just that your hard drives did not live as long as you expected?

Tell me, do you change the oil in your car's engine, or do you expect your multi-thousand dollar car purchases to "just work"?

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[Sir_Sri]

Ya, patch tuesday for windows machines and not even all of those.

It drives me crazy that flash insists on checking for updates on startup, but not the rest of the time, opera only notifies me of updates when I close it and reopen, and a few other things like that. I'm sure a lot of it is configurable better, but because it happens so rarely I usually forget, and then get annoyed when I found out there was an update a week ago that I didn't get a notification for.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[GNious]

Good for you - I have had to update firmware on harddrives, because there weren't linux-compatible (go figure).
This involved booting to DOS (?!?) and running a program that ultimately failed to do anything.

Merely trying to figure out how to boot to DOS (Discover FreeDOS, figure out creating a working and booting memstick) was an exercise in stupidity, to say nothing of the idiocy of having harddrives that are not linux-compatible.

 

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[stewbacca]

Wait, what? I shouldn't have to do anything with a hard drive for several years. My anecdote, however, is that hard drives die a sudden, horrible, unreversable, unannounced death long before the usable life span of the computer itself. Worst technology ever.

And what in the hell kind of analogy is akin to changing motor oil when talking about a hard drive? I should have been applying some sort of lubricant to the moving parts all these years????

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[ShakaUVM]

>>Second, SSDs have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper.

Not that big, not that cheap. But better, I guess.

>>You no longer need to decide between spending a fortune or segregating your apps out; a $60 SSD will hold the OS and every app you could ever possibly run

$60 = 60GB.

I have a 60GB SSD as my windows drive right now, and it's absolutely too small for my purposes. I don't have a single game installed on it. All my photos and videos are on my 2TB secondary HDD. And I have 2GB free. I'm upgrading to a 250GB SSD as we speak. I *may* move my Steam directory over. It's sitting at 170GB right now. =)

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[amorsen]

My Intel X25-M died on me a few weeks ago. It started doing write errors, then some reads started failing too. It was possible to read all but two files off the /home partition. This was with the original firmware, I never got around to doing the performance upgrade.

It is nasty to have a drive die, but there are certainly worse failures than that one.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[amorsen]

Read googles hard disk failure analysis. Smart is a poor indicator of disk failure. Most failed disks in my experience do give no warning

Exactly!

According to Googles data, you can expect SMART data to change in less than half of the cases where drives die, and less than half of the cases where SMART warns actually lead to drive failures.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[drsmithy]

However, the key thing is that you get some warning with a hard drive rather than it being sudden death.

Hard disks are quite capable of keeling over with no warning whatsoever. I've seen many do it.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[pla]

Bullshit detected.

What the hell do you run, that you can fill over 100GB just with apps (not talking data - So for example, I need MSSQL on my box for dev purposes, but I sure as hell don't install 500GB of actual DBs on the system drive). The games, you have a somewhat valid point in that you still need to at least pay attention to their size and how many you have installed at once, but hardly valid to cry "bullshit".


...Riiight. Show me the $60 SSD drive that will hold Win7, Photoshop, and more than a couple of modern games.

Will 128GB do it for ya?. Not the exact model I have, but the same size - And I have a lot of shit installed. Win7, Office, VS2012, MSSQL2012, hundreds of smaller one-off tools, a handful of games... And have well over half the system disk free.

Win7 64 bit recommends 20GB, but realistically uses around 12GB. Office 2010 takes 3GB. The CS6 "Master Collection" (for you millionaires in the Slashdot audience) takes 14.5GB. VS2012 takes 10GB.

As for a few games, hey, you got me. That spare 80+GB will "only" fit a dozen or so. So for the use case of "hardcore gamer and developer and graphic designer on a shoestring budget", you absolutely should not use an SSD, because it takes just too much work on top of the rest of your busy schedule to uninstall older games.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[ipsi]

I, personally, have over 580GiB of games installed on my machine (the vast majority legally purchased!), completely excluding Windows and all other software. Admittedly, Games are much closer to data than apps, so installing them all to a separate drive would not trouble me at all. But they are still, strictly speaking, apps, and so every app I could possibly run on a cheap SSD? Not a chance in hell. My work machine, on the other hand, totals up 160GiB, data and all, so that would happily operate on a cheap SSD.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[Tapewolf]

There are a variety of different ongoing tests to look at how long drives actually last. Looking at a fairly standard older Intel 320 40GB drive, it went 190TB written before the MWI threshold was reached, and continued on until 685TB. That means it completely rewrote the drive 17500+ times.

Yeah, but the problem is they keep reducing the size of the flash cells. It's getting to the point where they're actually having to expend write cycles to prevent the data evaporating, and with smaller gates you get significantly less write cycles to begin with, and once you start going from MLC to TLC, it starts to look kind of ugly.

That and I am kind of worried about data retention in these things. I have some EPROMs from 1988 which were rated for about 10 years, though the contents were still readable (and the machine still worked) in 2010 when I made a backup. I'd be impressed if 20nm TLC flash can retain data for 5.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[jkflying]

It does fill up with metal shavings though, and those don't lubricate quite as well...

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[whoever57]

Put a freakin "check computer" light on the case since you love the car analogies. If SMART senses an I/O error, it can be flagged and the light can be lit

Blame your OS vendor for the lack of built-in SMART monitoring capabilities.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[dgatwood]

What the hell do you run, that you can fill over 100GB just with apps (not talking data - So for example, I need MSSQL on my box for dev purposes, but I sure as hell don't install 500GB of actual DBs on the system drive).

I have several problems with your reasoning:

• Try explaining to an average user that there's more than one hard drive in his or her machine.
• Try splitting data across multiple drives in most laptops (single drive bay).
• Try to convince users that they need to carry around most of their files on an external hard drive because their internal storage is too small, but that this doesn't mean their new computer is crap. GFL.

Sure, if you're willing to work at managing your files, you can deal with the limitations of a small SSD. That doesn't make it pleasant, and that doesn't mean that most people are going to be willing to put up with it. Most people either A. don't have much data and can cleanly fit their digital lives on a small SSD or B. have a crapton of data and aren't willing to put up with the headache of multiple drives. The number of folks outside those two camps is vanishingly small. This is why we need bigger, cheaper SSDs.

Re:I have seen SSDs used just to load the OS

[Vegemeister]

I don't even know what the heck "SMART" data is.

Then why the fuck are you on Slashdot?

No way. Too late. SSDs already cheap enough

[Anonymous Coward]

240GB SSDs are bouncing around 200. 2 bills for the boot SSD and your old drive gets the data partition and you are beating these hybrids on performance AND price.

Re:No way. Too late. SSDs already cheap enough

[imbusy]

And a good 2.5" 750GB drive is $85. Compare that to $200.

Re:No way. Too late. SSDs already cheap enough

[jedidiah]

For $200 you can get yourself a 3TB drive and have change left over.

Re:No way. Too late. SSDs already cheap enough

[shitzu]

This guy is saying - for a $200k i can buy a Ferrari. You are saying - hey, you can get a perfectly good combine harvester for less money.
Hard disk gigabyte price vs SSD gigabyte price is not the issue discussed here - performance is.

Re:No way. Too late. SSDs already cheap enough

[lightknight]

Exactly. I have a 240GB SSD for my laptop and desktop's main drives, with oodles of secondary storage (7200 RPM, of course). The difference is magnificent. If you've never used a SSD before, you simply do not understand -> Adobe Photoshop CS5 loads in only 3 or 4 seconds. Try doing that on a mechanical hard drive, and it's just PAIN.

Re:No way. Too late. SSDs already cheap enough

[FlyHelicopters]

^ If you have a laptop with only a single drive bay and you need 750GB of space, so be it, you have to do that...

But if you have the space to have both drives, the amount of time you won't waste by having the SSD boot drive, is a lot...

I suspect a lot of people here dissing SSDs have never actually used one in their primary system. Once you go SSD, you never go back, it is painful.

Re:No way. Too late. SSDs already cheap enough

[dbIII]

5 year warranty for that price

That's a major shift of the goalposts there.
Can't we just have an honest discussion without idiots throwing in extra conditions just so they can win some silly little mass debate game?

Re:No way. Too late. SSDs already cheap enough

[obarthelemy]

Not on capacity though. $200 could also buy you a 60GB SSD+ 2TB HDD, maybe 3T.

As TFA is saying, with the programs they evaluated, you then get the best of both worlds: high speed **and** high capacity, at the same price.

Re:No way. Too late. SSDs already cheap enough

[darkmeridian]

Staples was selling 240 GB SSD drives from Sandisk for $119.99 without a mail in rebate. Prices are dropping precipitously, my friends.

Re:No way. Too late. SSDs already cheap enough

[avandesande]

Java apps really benefit to... open office is amazingly quick.

bad review, what about hybrid drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

They did not include a true hybrid like the Seagate Momentus. No stupid driver tricks needed to make it work, it would have been really great to see how it compared to what was reviewed.

Re:bad review, what about hybrid drives?

[Lumpy]

Under a simple OS like windows? yes, I added one to my work PC and it flies. I then got another for my mac book pro and it flips out causing problems. same goes for using it under linux. It seems that more advanced filesystems and OS's that do a lot of housekeeping to the drive will freak these drives out.

Luckily I was able to sell my second drive to a friend who could use it in his windows laptop.

Re:bad review, what about hybrid drives?

[Lord Maud'Dib]

Strange, I've had a 500GB Momentus XT in a Mac Mini (running OS X) for over a year and it has run flawlessly. There was also a noticeable speed improvement.

Re:bad review, what about hybrid drives?

[Dot.Com.CEO]

What? I'm using one on my Linux laptop (a quad i7 with 8Gb running Ubuntu), and the performance is truly stunning. That specific drive is also considered a damn good upgrade for Macbook Pros, so I honestly have no idea why you think it works better on Windows or whatever. In my opinion, it's pretty much the best cost / benefit ratio on hdds out there.

Re:bad review, what about hybrid drives?

[Vegemeister]

All the hybrid drives I've seen have so little flash that you could do better by maxing your RAM.

All software is not created equal

[Nemilar]

It seems that SSD accelerators can be hit/miss. If you take a look at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/12/velobit_demartek/ for example, some of these products don't seem to do anything - while some seem to actually work.

Like any young industry, it'll probably a while to shake out field until only a few decent contenders remain.

Surprisingly why?

[Sycraft-fu]

It would be surprising if it weren't the case. We've been doing the same thing with memory for years. Our CPUs need memory that can perform in the realm of 100GB/sec or more with extremely low latency, but we can't deliver that with DRAM. So we cache. When you have multiple levels of proper caching you can get like 95%+ of the theoretical performance you'd get having all the RAM be the faster cache, but at a fraction of the price.

This is just that taken to HDDs. Doesn't scale quite as well but similar idea. Have some high speed SSD for cache and slower HDD for storage and you can get some pretty good performance.

I love Seagate's little H-HDDs for laptops. I have an SSD in my laptop, but only 256GB. Fine for apps, but I can't hold all my data on there (music, virtual instruments, etc). They are just too pricey to get all the storage I'd need. So I also have an H-HDD (laptop has two drive bays). It's performance is very good, quite above what you'd expect for a laptop drive, but was only $150 for 750GB instead of $900 for 600GB (the closest I can find in SSDs).

Re:Surprisingly why?

[fermion]

I think that RAM is dirt cheap, and storing local copies in RAM is always the better way to deal with HDD delays. It seems it would be better to put 8GB of RAM in the computer, for $50, than spend money on a SSD to accelerate a HDD.

I have had laptops with up to 750GB HDD. My current laptop has a 256GB SSD, and my next will have at least 500GB. I hate to be buzzword complient, but I don't need all the video and music on my computer all the time. I can leave that in external storage, the cloud, and download it as needed. As it is most of that stuff has been sitting on external terrabyte HDD anyway, HDD that are cheap but terribly unreliable. At 256GB i have to manage the space, but I seldom run out of storage completely. The speed at which my computer boots up and runs makes all the difference in the world.

I do agree that a dollar a GB retail is really expensive, and I would never upgrade to SSD, but the marginal cost added to a new computer is often not significant.

Re:Surprisingly why?

[dbIII]

I think that RAM is dirt cheap, and storing local copies in RAM

A decent OS (back down MS fanboys, Win7 fits sometimes too) uses RAM to cache a lot of stuff anyway without the hassle of a ramdisk. That file you opened yesterday may still be in RAM and open very quickly if you have enough spare memory.
Sometimes they work well though. It's nice to have a 20GB ramdisk for scratch space for software that is too braindead to use memory when it's available and just hammers the disk instead. I've got two orders of magnitude in speed improvement on some closed source commercial software on linux just by feeding it a ramdisk.

Re:Surprisingly why?

[DigiShaman]

Cache levels.

L1 and L2 on die per CPU core.
L3 is on die and shared among all CPU cores.
L4 is RAM
L5 is SSD accelerator
L6 is HDD.
L7 is Cloud storage off in Internet lala land.
L8 is stored on my old HDDs someplace in the dumpster. It might be found in a few hundred years from now.

Pointless

[AlienIntelligence]

SSD's were recently @ $1/Gig. That's when I upgraded everything.

I've seen them as low as 55-65c a gig now. Yeah... gotta love how
tech drops in price RIGHT AFTER you decide to adopt.

Buy a WHOLE SSD drive. Put all the programs you use daily on it.

120G ~ $70

That is all.

FWIW, except for bulk storage, I will NEVER buy a spinning HD again.
I experienced a RIDICULOUS speed up, going from a 7200rpm drive.

-AI

Re:Pointless

[Mashiki]

To be honest, despite the dire doom and gloom warnings of people that the "end times will come" to first generation adopters of SSD's, I've got a first generation OCZ drive that's still chugging along and working like the day it was new. Heck, my page file is on it. It hasn't even used any of the backup blocks yet, 3 years on now and no complaints yet. I have a second 60GB drive that I transfer stuff on to if I'm using it alot, like MMO's and some programs that use large textures(Shogun2, Skyrim and so on) just to cut down on the load times.

Everything else? Yeah, it's dumped onto my 1TB and 2TB drives.

Re:Pointless

[AlienIntelligence]

To be honest, despite the dire doom and gloom warnings of people that the "end times will come" to first generation adopters of SSD's, I've got a first generation OCZ drive that's still chugging along and working like the day it was new.

Thanks for that.

I did jump both feet into the SSD thing, knowing I could hit that switch
one day and be met with the same silence, just less screen =)

It's good to hear from a person that their SSD hasn't died on them.

FWIW, I hope you didn't jinx yourself.

-AI

Re:Pointless

[Mashiki]

All too possible, I do have a backup in place just in case. But if it dies, it dies. 3 years won't be bad, it's hard enough to find mechanical drives with a 3 year warranty on them anymore.

Re:Pointless

[damnbunni]

That's a nice concept, but the programs I want to use that would be accelerated by being on an SSD are ten to thirty gigs each.

Installing and uninstalling, or at least installing and then moving to another drive as needed, gets old. Fast.

With a cache accelerator SSD setup, I just install all my games, and play them whenever, without worrying which ones are on the SSD and which ones are on the hard drive.

Is it as fast as just using an SSD? No. It it _almost_ as fast? Yes.

And more importantly, it's much less of a pain in the butt than moving files between drives manually.

(Also, I was able to install a caching SSD without having to do a reinstall of Windows and whatnot. Install drive, install driver, reboot. It's easy to add to an existing system.)

Not confined to high-end.

[jibjibjib]

> In reality, the shift from hard drives (HDDs) to SSDs has thus far been confined to the upper end of the PC market.

Not entirely. I have the cheapest netbook I could find, and I replaced its hard drive with a cheap low-capacity SSD. I don't keep much big stuff on it so the capacity isn't a problem. In terms of performance and power usage and not having to worry about my data when I drop my computer, it's been entirely worth it.

Re:Not confined to high-end.

[lightknight]

Indeed. I have a severe doubt that it's the 'upper end' of the market. In reality, it's probably the more technically literate part of the market, who understands the difference between a SSD and a HD.

Only new for the consumer...

[phoebus1553]

This is exactly what has been going on in the enterprise storage space for a while. I only know much about two vendors, but they both have a solution like this. High end IBM storage has EasyTier, which while originally for the mix of FCAL/SAS to SATA, it works with SSD too, and in the latest revs all 3 tiers at the same time. NetApp used to have a PAM card which is now called... FlashCache? FlexCache? F-Something-Cache anyway, which is essentially an SSD drive on a PCI card.

Good to see the high end tech being applied to consumer level workloads.

No mention of OS requirements

[antifoidulus]

The article doesnt mention any other software(mostly OS) requirements for the accelerators, which is a pretty big deal. Basically there are 2 ways to cache:
1. On the file level, which isnt very resource intensive(there aren't nearly as many files as blocks on a disk), but requires that the accelerator be able to read file system metadata(and of course be able to intercept OS calls) which severely restricts what kind of file system, and really even operating systems, you can use with the accelerator
or
2. Block-level caching. Much more generic, can really be used with any file system as the blocks, not any file system metadata, are the only thing that is used. However managing all that block information comes at a cost, either in main memory or more expensive hardware. For instance Flashcache requires about 500 megs of memory to manage a 300GB disk. Depending on your usage this may be acceptable(though is memory really that much cheaper than ssds nowadays?) but for most it isnt.

From the article I can assume that they only tested Windows, and that really limits its usefulness.

Re:No mention of OS requirements

[Neil Boekend]

Speed improvements of BSD and Linux machines is more usefull. Most users use an Windows machine as their PC, but the servers they interact with usually aren't windows machines. Speeding those servers up means there are less of them needed and thus it saves cost. A home PC on the other hand is usually idle.

Re:No mention of OS requirements

[antifoidulus]

Because its a garbage operating system? Seriously, not separating the logical and physical volume layout? How fucking retarded can you get?

Re:No mention of OS requirements

[bill_mcgonigle]

For instance Flashcache requires about 500 megs of memory to manage a 300GB disk.

I put a 100GB SSD pair (Intel SLC, IIRC) in front of a 2TB 7200RPM Hitachi 3.5" pair using FlashCache, and the results are amazing. I've got several VM's on them, including databases, and the databases are faster than when the database had its own 15,000RPM 2.5" pair for dedicated use.

Those SSD's are about $400 each, so I pay about $8/GB after mirroring. 2GB of server ram is about $20. So, 1MB of server RAM is about 10 cents. Figure 15 cents for FlashCache overhead. So, I have to pay $15 in RAM to run FlashCache on my $800 worth of SSD's. This is not a problem.

Re:No mention of OS requirements

[antifoidulus]

For servers who have lots of available memory slots it's not necassarilu a problem(though memory is still orders of magnitude faster than SSDs, so depending on your workflow you may be able to get just as good performance by using that memory for caching, but those gains can often be difficult to realize...), but for notebooks it's a huge issue. Not very many notebooks(which is what TFA was discussing) can go to 32 gigs of ram, so performance gains tend to be pretty limited

In reality?

[kwerle]

In reality, the shift from hard drives (HDDs) to SSDs has thus far been confined to the upper end of the PC market.

In reality, 100% of the smartphones, tablets, many/all? of the ultrabooks, and many notebooks now ship with SSDs. In a short time, virtually all laptops will ship with SSDs.
Disks will go the way of tapes. You'll be able to get them, but the practical uses will be few.

In reality, I imagine that more computers (yeah, I count smart phones and tablets) are now sold with SSDs than disks.

As to your actual question about accelerators - I have no idea. I went solid state a couple of years ago and won't be going back.

Re:How to secure it?

[petermgreen]

With pretty much any modern drive (whether platter based or solid state) if you are paranoid about data security you have two options, either encrypt everything that may ever hit the drive or physically destroy the drive when you are done with it. Both platter based and soild state drives have remapping systems in place (though soild state drives to a lot more remapping) such that it is pretty much impossible to gaurantee an external overrwrite will hit anything. Both have built-in "secure erase" commands but noone except the manufacturers really knows how secure they are.

I'll stick with a mechanical drive for now.

[p51d007]

Booting? Who boots their computer? I'm like a lot and on a UPS at home, and boot? I might boot once a month, if that. If I need to boot, I'll grab something from the fridge, take a bathroom break for the 1-2 minutes it takes to reboot. The minor boost I would get from a SSD pales in comparison to the SPACE I would benefit from...for now. If/when the price gets down to the mechanical drive pricing per gig, I'll give it another go, but for now, I'll take the space over speed.

Re:I'll stick with a mechanical drive for now.

[FlyHelicopters]

^ Then you haven't tried it...

Running a computer that you actually use, not a server that just sits there, but your actual desktop or laptop...

If you haven't tried it, you don't understand, if you try it, you will never, ever go back to spinning disks. The difference is so far beyond night and day, it is just amazing. Much greater than the jump from single core to dual core, much more than most other tech jumps over the years. Take the move from Pentium 4 to Core 2, then multiply that jump times about 50.

That is how much of a difference SSDs are over HDDs.

Re:I'll stick with a mechanical drive for now.

[onefriedrice]

That is how much of a difference SSDs are over HDDs.

This shouldn't be the case unless your operating system sucks at caching, and I am speaking as an early adopter (have had one SSD or another for 3+ years). The GP's point is valid: SSDs are great for improving bootup and application startup time, but unless you plan to put all your files on SSD (or, like I said, your OS sucks at caching), the returns are definitely diminishing. Better to max out the DRAM.

That said, I generally do recommend SSDs; just get a small, cheap one for the OS. You don't need the headaches of moving files between SSD and HDD. Just keep the distinction clear; SSD is for the OS and apps (/) and HDD is for all my files (/home). Easy. I would only get a hybrid if it was for a laptop and there was only one slot for a hard drive.

I also put the swap on my SSDs. I only have 4G DRAM in one of my machines with such a setup; when I occasionally and unintentially start thrashing, having the swap on an SSD keeps the computer usable and the problem is easily fixed without the UI locking up too badly.

Re:I'll stick with a mechanical drive for now.

[FlyHelicopters]

?

Which OS sucks at caching? For desktop use, there are two OSes to pick from, Windows and OS X, and OS X is a very small part of the market, about 8%, but it does have a strong consumer penetration. (No, Linux doesn't count, at 1% of the overall market, and for primary desktop use, is just a rounding error)

I suspect the demographics at SlashDot are not really a good spread of the *mass market*, for the average user, a SSD is such an amazing upgrade, people don't know how they lived without it.

I have installed a SSD into my mother-in-laws laptop, my mother's desktop, friend's computers, everyone, without question, are amazed at the difference. Everything is just so much *snappier* compared to before.

And people really do open and close programs, my mother-in-law often opens her laptop, does something for 10 min, then closes it, which hibernates it. Then later she'll open it again, do something else, then close it again. Even just the speed of hibernation and waking up is huge. Then when you launch new programs that were closed...

For always on, everything always open machines, I see how it matters less with everything cached in memory, but I don't believe that is how average people use their computers.

Re:I'll stick with a mechanical drive for now.

[Vegemeister]

Tell your mother-in-law to use S3 suspend.

Simpler solutions tend to be superior.

[Above]

SSD prices have fallen quickly, while hard drives have gone up. If you don't need large amounts of storage it's better to just go SSD. But what if large amounts of storage are needed?

I would recommend buying an SSD, putting the OS and all applications on it, and then using a magnetic drive as the "users" volume. Any sanely laid out OS makes this very easy. The OS and Apps will load quickly, the large items (like video) will be stored on the cheaper, larger disk storage. No "hybrid" algorithm to worry about working. Two separate parts that can be upgraded independently. No OS support required. Perhaps some acceleration of some small data files will be missed, but the large ones would have never fit in the accelerated flash anyway.

I do think that file systems need to evolve in a new direction. ZFS is a preview in the right direction, but it would be nice to have a file system where you could add ram disk, or flash disk and tell it to be used as a "cache" for underlying disk, write through or write back. Easy to do in software. Plus better backup and replication support. I'd really like to configure my laptop with a 2TB spining disk, 256G super-fast SSD, and give 1G of RAM to the file system. Tell the file system to write everything through to magnetic, cache frequently used in SSD and RAM. When I'm on the hope network replicate the spinning disk to my NAS bit for bit. Perform incremental backups to my cloud backup service when connected to a fast enough network using compressed incremental to save space. Give me all that with ZFS's other features and it would be sysadmin filesystem nirvana...

Re:Simpler solutions tend to be superior.

[gman003]

I would recommend buying an SSD, putting the OS and all applications on it, and then using a magnetic drive as the "users" volume. Any sanely laid out OS makes this very easy.

Just an FYI for everyone, Windows does not count as a sane OS for this purpose. I managed to render a Windows install unusable trying to do that.

The best trick is to move just specific user's folders, not the whole Users directory, over, and then symlink it back to the original location. Trying to move the entire \Users folder almost always breaks something, often rendering it impossible to log in. Other methods either require setting up your own unattended install disks with odd config files, or do not work completely.

The general process:
1) Install Windows to the SSD as normal
2) Create a user account and a backup account. For this demonstration, their original, default home folders will be C:\Users\GMan and C:\Users\Admin
3) Reboot (to log both out completely)
4) Log into the backup account, otherwise the system will choke while copying your registry files
5) use Robocopy to copy the user folder to the hard drive (robocopy C:\Users\GMan D:\Users\GMan /COPYALL /E)
6) Delete the user folder (rmdir C:\Users\GMan)
7) Symlink the folder on the hard drive back to the SSD (mklink /J C:\Users\GMan D:\Users\GMan)
8) Repeat for any other users, but note that you only need one "backup" account

This gives a few advantages:
1) It works transparently with programs that assume you are at C:\Users\[username]
2) It copies all user data, not just documents/images/videos
3) If the hard drive fails, you don't break the OS - you can log in using the alternate account (Admin in my example) to try to recover things
4) If you really wanted to, you could try to set some specific files in your user directory to be on the SSD
5) If you have a Windows install, or at least recovery partition, on the hard drive, either drive can fail without rendering the system unusable.

Re:Simpler solutions tend to be superior.

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Thanks for writing this. Will use this at some point :-)

Re:Simpler solutions tend to be superior.

[gman003]

No problem - I wish I had known that when I first tried it. Took a whole day to get it working right, since I had to reinstall so many times.

Re:Simpler solutions tend to be superior.

[Above]

Uh, Windows is sane for this purpose, and this is commonly done in corporate environments, keeping all user data on an CIFS share.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/190286/move_your_data_to_a_safer_separate_partition_in_windows_7.html

Basically install windows to C:, the SSD.

Spin up D:, the magnetic storage.

Create D:\Users\

Change the users home directory (My Documents) in the user properties to D:\Users\ (corp environments would be something like \\userserver\Users\).

It's more or less the same thing as changing your home directory path on a Unix machine.

Windows does not like Symlinks.

Re:Simpler solutions tend to be superior.

[gman003]

While Windows itself might work well with that setup, a lot of (badly-coded) programs do not, either assuming your home directory *must* be C:\Users\, or even worse, C:\Documents and Settings\.

And Windows seems to be working fine with symlinks now. At least directory symlinks - haven't needed file symlinks yet.

what an ugly bandaid

[parshimers]

i dont know about windows, but, wouldn't a more elegant way to accomplish this be paging? having a very large swap on the SSD portion and a very high swappiness value would sort of do what this intends to do, without such an end-run around the entire cache architecture of the OS

Re:what an ugly bandaid

[davydagger]

you'd end up breaking your SSD with excesive write cycles.

here is a hint, never use swap on an SSD. with more than 4-8GB you really should not need swap on a modern linux desktop, at all.

SSD Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

While the performance may be nice I still have a lot of concerns about reliability of SSDs.
I bought a Crucial M4 256GB SSD about 9 months ago and it started to fail a week or two ago.
So far Crucial won't RMA it and just keeps asking meaningless questions via email.

What kind of reliability are people seeing in SSD and hybrid drives? What happens when the NAND flash dies on a hybrid drive?
I've got hard drives that have been running non-stop for years without a problem. From my experience so far SSDs just don't match up in that regard.

Re:SSD Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, that is the 5,000 hour bug.

Update the firmware.

http://bit.ly/O1Fvzj

http://hothardware.com/News/Crucial-Acknowledges-Weird-5000-Hour-M4-SSD-Bug-Promises-Firmware-Fix-in-MidJanuary/

http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

really??

[davydagger]

Here is a good idea for linux

plug your SSD into SATA slot one, a large magnetic disk into slot two.

install the bootloader and OS onto the SSD, and use it for /, and then mount your magnetic disk for /home.

problem solved. Of course this works for any pair of "large but slow" and "small but fast" disks.

Single Article - Multiple Pages

[Taco Cowboy]

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 !
 

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[sortius_nod]

Not only this, the claims are at least 12 months out of date. SSD's are now less than $1/GB, & the average drive sold now is 120 or 128GB.

I upgraded my desktop with a cheap solution (AMD A8, 990FX, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 2TB HDD) all for less than my last upgrade cost ($669 vs $955) 3 years ago. SSDs are definitely part of the norm now, we order many machines with dual 128MB SSDs in them, both laptops & desktops. The price difference is negligible, so this article seems more like a cry by someone attempting to hold onto the old way of doing things.

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[obarthelemy]

Not all of us are gamerz ?

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[jawtheshark]

AMD A8 (and A6 and A4) have a graphics core on board. Those graphics cores even are quite sufficient for non-hardcore gaming. I'm a fan of the FM1 platorm, and think it is way underrated. It has decent processing power, decent graphics, is very quiet (even with stock cooler) and not expensive at all. Example: A6-3650 (86.90€), 2x8GB kit RAM DDR3-1333 from ADATA (67.98€), motherboard GIGABYTE GA-A75-D3H (99.90€). That's quite some power for 254.78€ (including taxes, excluding shipping -- prices taken at Alternate). Like many of us, we just reuse the disk and the case we already own. There is no need for a graphics card in such a system, unless you're a hardcore gamer.

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[sortius_nod]

I recently bought an ATi 6850... Do I still need to upgrade it? No.

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[StrifeJester]

You don't need to be a gamer. Compiling is a lot faster on SSD too you know.

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[jones_supa]

Except that the GP was talking about a video card.

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD A8 (and A6 and A4) have a graphics core on board. Those graphics cores even are quite sufficient for non-hardcore gaming. I'm a fan of the FM1 platorm, and think it is way underrated. It has decent processing power, decent graphics, is very quiet (even with stock cooler) and not expensive at all

You need to revise your viewpoint a little. The A series have terribly slow cores that aren't much better than Atom cores. The graphics were decent a year and a half ago. FM1 is a dead end, since no further parts will be made for that socket, and the price is excessive right now. Right now I can buy an i3 or i5 and a decent video card for not much more than the cost of an A8. Even the i3 stomps the A8's wimpy cores.

These were kinda cool over a year ago, but the prices were still too high for what they were and a lot of buyers were very disappointed in the performance once purchased.

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[theun4gven]

Not sure if this link will work, but clicking the print link at the top of most of these articles will bring up a single page view with no ads or sidebars filling up the screen.

Here you go: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133637-cache-of-the-titans-ssd-storage-accelerators-from-intel-and-corsair-face-off?print

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[tedgyz]

Would you like some cheeze with that whine?

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[spikestabber]

Seeing that you can get Sandforce based OCZ 240GB SSD's for a mere $170 or less with taxes, they should be on the list of must-haves for that new PC build. Affordability is no longer an issue.

Re:Single Article - Multiple Pages

[jawtheshark]

The A series have terribly slow cores that aren't much better than Atom cores.

Citation needed. The cores are based on the Mobile Phenom II architecture Llano. In Benchmarks the A6-3650 ranks around a Phenom II X4. While this is not top of the line, it's pretty decent power.

Atoms aren't even in the same ballpark. Perhaps you are thinking of the E-350, which is in the Atoms league but with better graphics? Try even finding Atom motherboard supporting SATA3, USB3 and 16GB RAM (many of the FM1 motherboards support up to 64GB RAM!)

FM1 is a dead end

So what? Intel switches sockets more often than its underwear. In this price category, upgradeability doesn't matter much. These kind of machines get built, used, and replaced. Never upgraded.

Even the i3 stomps the A8's wimpy cores.

... but you'd have to buy a graphics card. Intel isn't exactly known to have snappy graphics. Depending on your workload, more cores might be better. I was surprised, though, to see that motherboards for Intel CPU have become much cheaper. Last time, I checked most motherboards for Intel CPUs were massively more expensive. Coupled with a more expensive CPU, this made the platform uninteresting for budget computers.

A year ago, the competing i3s were slower too and the price of the motherboards were higher. Back then the An series were much better bang/buck.

The modern i3s are much faster (especially per core). Still, the cheapest i3 I can find (i3-2120) is 112.90€. That's 26€ more expensive than the A6-3650 I quoted. To have an equivalent motherboard, I'll stay within brand (Gigabyte) and set as conditions 4 RAM slots (as 4x4GB is cheapest today), SATA3, USB3. The cheapest here is GIGABYTE GA-B75M-D3H at 83.90€, which admittedly is 16€ cheaper and 2x8GB kit RAM DDR3-1333 from ADATA (67.98€) which is identical to my original quote. Overall cost of the i3 platform is thus indeed just 10€ more expensive. As said, this is mainly because motherboard prices became much lower than in the past. So, yes, you pay 4% more, for a 17% CPU power increase (based on passmark value). In the graphics department, the view is much less rosy (again, according to passmark values): the HD 6530D in the AMD A6-3650 delivers more than double the performance of the Intel i3 HD 2120. You'll have to compensate that with a graphics card, which costs money and east power and most likely has an additional fan and is thus louder.

One needs to look at the complete platform and decide what is more important. I guess the budget conscious gamer would be better off with the i3/Graphics card combo. The budget conscious occasional gamer, is probably better of with the AMD An processors. The budget conscious office dweller: i3 with integrated graphics.

a lot of buyers were very disappointed in the performance once purchased.

I wasn't and most reviews I read were actually quite positive. You don't expect i5 or i7 performance from these kind of CPUs. What I got was silence, enough power to have headroom and decent graphics all for a decent price.

OCZ can be a nightmare

[TeriZip]

Be very careful - Nvelo says you cannot install any windows update or image the drive. http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?99185-OCZ-synapse-cache-128Mb-Nightmare-to-get-it-to-work-I-beg-for-help

Re:OCZ can be a nightmare

[slashmydots]

Let me correct that. Anything ending in a 1-3 is a catastrophe. The new Agility and Vertex 4's are supposed to be practically invincible. Low voltage writes, RAID arrays made out of the internal chips themselves, base-8 arrangement or whatever to get 128GB instead of 120, 9000+ write cycles, under $100! Yeah, those kick ass...except as of right now, they will fall out of BIOS detection repeatedly and blue screen and cause nonstop chaos and hell on Earth unless you update them to the 1.5 firmware, which takes approx 30 seconds. Newegg drives are shipping out with 1.4.0, infotel/systemax/Tiger Direct are shipping with 1.5 preinstalled. So just flash them and they operate perfectly. I have 2 laptops and 3 PCs all with the Agility 4's and every single one had problems before flashing and every single one has operated fine for over a month after flashing.
P.S. the Agility 4's don't come anywhere near their rated speed and are almost half the speed of a Maplecrest, Pyro, or HyperX (but double the speed of a typical spinning hard drive)

ZFS caching

[liquidhokie]

ZFS already supports flash devices for caches. For read caching (L2 ARC), you can create striped cache volumes. You get better speed that way, and if one of the devices fails, ZFS knows it and just goes straight to the main storage volume (the one being cached). Meanwhile, the other drive continues. For write caching (ZIL), since the data is "worth" more, you can create a mirror of flash devices. The benefit of the ZIL is realized even if the cache is small, but unfortunately SSD write speed can be worse than writing to regular drives (see below about SLC drives).

The best theoretical configuration would be, at a minimum:
- two small (and fast) SLC devices, mirrored and used for write caching
- two large(r) MLC devices, striped and used for read caching
- a redundant array of inexpensive drives (someone should come up with a catchy term for that), of huge capacity but otherwise slow (5400 rpm)

In place of the SLC drives, there are even more expensive (but higher performing) options, such as a bank of volatile RAM with a battery backup, and an SSD that the RAM contents get copied to in case of a power loss. These exist, and really work. The theory of a pyramid of caching; with "slower and cheaper" at the base and "faster and pricier" towards the top really has been shown to work.

ZFS can do all of this right now, and continuing a little off topic... can also do compressed incremental volume snapshots sent into the cloud :)

Yeah, I do a lot of work with ZFS. All of this stuff really works.

Re:ZFS caching

[cmdrbuzz]

The only issue I have with ZFS is that I managed to loose 5 years worth of data when my Solaris 10 server had a power outage and my ZFS pool wouldn't mount again. "The pool metadata is corrupted and the pool cannot be opened"

Not even opening it on Solaris 11 and attempting to force mount it worked. And yes I know its my own stupid fault for not having a backup. Still it does make me a little shy now of using ZFS again.

complete BS

[slashmydots]

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.

i recently bought an asus p9x79 pro mobo

[circletimessquare]

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_2011/P9X79_PRO/

ASUS SSD Caching 3X faster performance at a click

SSD Caching from ASUS is easier than ever. At 3X faster, this feature boosts system performance by using an installed SSD with no capacity limitations as a cache for frequently accessed data. Harness a combination of SSD-like performance and response and hard drive capacity with just one click, no rebooting needed and instant activation for complete ease of use, and even prevent data loss with included backup functionality.

This is NOT taxing the CPU, this is all hardware controller chip.

I haven't tried it out yet, but you pair any old SSD you want with any old HD you want, and voila.

The obvious selling point is that it is so easy.

Re:i recently bought an asus p9x79 pro mobo

[damnbunni]

Except not, since Intel SmartResponse doesn't work on the Z79 boards, and SmartResponse is limited to 64 gigs - this Asus board specifically says it'll work with the full capacity of any SSD.

Worst of both worlds

[WaffleMonster]

Hybrid drives have been on the market for years. It seems to me your risk exposure is only increased by combining the two. You now have to worry about the perils of spinning platters, oxide eating flash write operations and new management technology gluing the systems together not widely deployed.

The last I checked about a year ago there were overwhelming negative comments related to reliability of hybrid drives. Even assuming all the bugs have since been worked out seems like such a fleeting and pointless stop-gap measure as to not be worthwhile.

I have enough memory that most applications load instantly from the operating system cache. 32GB of ddr is readily available for less than $200 ... nothing involving a SATA bus can be faster than the operating systems main memory disk cache.

Hopefully memristers or other technologies will pan out soon and we can be done with slow, power hungry access and inherently unreliable storage mediums once and for all.

No you don't.

[Chirs]

You'll still have slowdowns when you boot and the first time you access data.

more ram doesn't help everything

[Chirs]

No matter how much memory you have, it's going to be slow the first time you access something after booting up.

Large SSD-caching HDD for a laptop?

[KernyKat]

Can anyone point me to a good SSD-caching hard disk for a laptop, with a total SSD+HDD size of 500 Gb or more?

I want the benefit of rapid OS and application start-up, but also need the large disk space, so a simple SSD is still too expensive at these sizes. Other solutions for Laptops don't quite cut it... I'd rather not lug around an external HDD everywhere, and Laptops generally only have one drive bay, so I can't have one small SSD + one large HDD... Microsoft ReadyBoost is an alternative but requires a USB key or SD Card and probably isn't as effective as a firmware-based SSD-caching HDD.

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Hybrid drives are good

[tigersha]

Seagate Momentus XT are hybrid drives in both laptop and desktop form factors. For cases where you can only have one drive, in a notebook, you have no choice.

I have a 750 Gb Momentus XT in my laptop and the performance increase is noticable. And the drive only costs 30$ more then the non-bybrid one. Definitely worth the money.

Have tested Intel's solution a bit..

[Terrasque]

When I got my new Z77 board last week, I managed to slice my 120gb SSD into two parts. 18gb for Intel's cache system, and rest for "Data" - aka Windows install.

I configured the SSD to cache my 2tb spinney a bit, and it generally worked as expected. Performance ranged from clean SSD speed some places, to in worst case old HDD speed.

In other words, worst-case scenario was same as not having cache, and best-case scenario made it look like a 2TB SSD at no extra cost :)

I've currently disabled it, since currently I'm re-installing my steam games (over 300 in total..), but will re-enable it when the data is a bit more static again.

So far I consider the experiment a huge success, even though it complicated the install somewhat (SSD cache can only be configured from Windows, and only if the SSD is not running the OS).

Linux is great for DIY caching

[fa2k]

As others have commented, Linux has bcache and flashcache. If don't need everything to be GPL, it also has ZFS, which I use. The RAM caching of ZFS is top notch, but the SSD caching is extremely simplistic. I find that it performs really well, though, and using RAID and data checksums gives peace of mind. The cache is flushed on boot, so it's not good for things like laptops. There is also a separate system for write buffering, in addition to the read cache.

Re:Linux is great for DIY caching

[fa2k]

Just to clarify, the SSD caching is not simplistic because the developers are lazy, it's because it aims to have completely sequential writes to the cache device

SSD makers got greedy

[gelfling]

The cost benefit of SSD's barely makes sense - the makers got greedy and decided to tack absurd price premiums on their gear far in excess of their benefit. And they've stayed there.

Odometer

[ThatsNotPudding]

What Joe Consumer needs is an odometer equivalent for an SSD; something that can explicitly warn us when we're reaching the MWI cliff so we can plan for an upgrade (including nuking the old SSD) before we possibly lose even one bit. Without that, it's just murder in the dark.

No Good if Not Transparent

[EmagGeek]

If it requires O/S level drivers to implement the cache, then it's NFG.

SSD caching has promise, but it needs to be done in hardware, and be completely transparent to the O/S on top of it.

WRONG

[circletimessquare]

it's a marvell controller

it has different features (SSD size doesn't matter, ease of setup)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Unified Equation of storage solutions

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

I think we can end ANY additional article about the merits of storage technologies using the following unified equation

future tech > SSD > SSD Hybrids > HDD > optical disks > floppy drives > tape drives > punch cards > wall paintings > iCloud

Re:How long to SSD drive last?

[Shados]

If we're talking about SSDs in the last 14 month period, give or take a few months, keep in mind there was a huge batch of sandforce-based SSDs that, for a while, had very, VERY buggy firmwares that caused everything from constant crashes, blue screens, freezing, bad writes that corrupted everything whenever you patched the system or installed new software.... The firmware updates eventually came out that fixed the issue completely, but that took a while, and I expect most people who bought one of these (they were the cheapest "fast" SSDs for quite some time...don't know about time) to be having nothing but trouble, and resellers would replace them under warranty (which was pointless: the new one would also have the bad firmware).

We went through 3 of these ourselves until we realized it was a firmware issue, and it took 2-3 firmware updates each stating they would "FINALLY" fix it before they actually did.

Not saying that covers all the cases, but considering how common those SSDs were last year, it probably is the cause of quite a few.

Say what?

[DeadCatX2]

Absolute minimum latency for a fetch is 16ms on USB port

Where are you getting this number? I develop USB devices (Cypress FX2 Hi-Speed and a PIC for Full-Speed), and a USB Hi-Speed microframe is transmitted every 125 microseconds. When I initiate transfers, they almost always go out during the next microframe. I can and have sent two packets back and forth in a single millisecond, and that's without sending multiple packets per microframe (I believe I've seen up to 17 bulk packet transfers in one microframe before in a Cypress app note comparing bulk to isochronous).

The only USB devices I'm aware of with such poor latency are keyboards and mice, because they're generally low-speed devices.

Is this 16ms fetch latency some artifact of the OS? Because it's certainly not a limitation of the hardware and software, as I can personally attest to.

Re:OK, why do you want more than 100GB SSD?

[damnbunni]

I haven't bought a PC game that requires a disc in the drive to play for years. They all have a full install and some form of DRM (often Steam) now.

I probably have about sixty games installed on my PC, and I think one of them needs a disc in the drive to work. And that's Dune 2000, which is a) old as hell, and b) plays the video files off the CD, doesn't install them.

I haven't reinstalled Windows 'to regain lost performance' in years, either. I've never had a problem with it slowing down.

Of course, I only install the things I _need_ on it, to do the things I want to do. Games? Yes, to play them. Video transcoding software? Yes, because I need to work with files. Massive 'Community Codec Packs'? No, because they screw things up.

I just install everything to my hard drive and let a caching SSD figure out which files need speeding up at the moment. It's just easier.

Re:OK, why do you want more than 100GB SSD?

[neminem]

Back when I was really much of a gamer, because needing to have a cd (for that's what games came on at that time) in my drive to play a game pissed me off to no end (especially because it usually meant it was swapping things off the cd periodically, too, which was slow), I just made iso rips of my games, then mounted them to a virtual drive when I wanted to play one. Granted, I put all those isos onto an external, and only copied ones I was actively playing onto my primary drive, but still.

I have more than a hundred gigs just of music, and it's quite nice having all of -that- on my primary drive. If my laptop could've supported a SSD, a larger HDD and a dvd-r drive, I probably would've gotten all three. Sadly, it only had space for two, so I chose the 500 gig hdd and a dvd-r, and I'm not sad about that decision.