A Hybrid Approach For SSD Speed From Your 2TB HDD 194
Claave writes "bit-tech.net reports that SilverStone has announced a device that daisy-chains an SSD with a hard disk, with the aim of providing SSD speeds plus loads of storage space. The SilverStone HDDBoost is a hard disk caddy with an integrated storage controller, and is an easy upgrade for your PC. The device copies the 'front-end' of your hard disk to the SSD, and tells your OS to prefer the SSD when possible. SSD speeds for a 2TB storage device? Yep, sounds good to me!"
Save your money... (Score:1, Informative)
This seems like a lot of money to spend for potentially not a lot of speed. Generally, 2.5" hard drives aren't quite as fast as their 3.5" counterparts anyways, so you're spending a fair bit of money to speed up something that wasn't really made for speed anyways.
Sure, you can "drop it right in" to your existing computer, assuming that your desktop is for some reason already using 2.5" SATA drives. And if your desktop is currently using 2.5" SATA drives you probably didn't build it to be a speed demon anyways.
Re:Save your money... (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like in... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:look at the picture accompanying TFA - it uses (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, after looking at it more, it is a drive caddy -- for a 2.5" SSD. This device basically acts as a daisy chain controller that you hook both a 2.5" SSD and a regular 3.5" HD to. The controller then presents the combined device to the BIOS/OS as a single drive.
Re:Save your money... (Score:1, Informative)
I don't see where a 2.5" HD is required
If you RTFA, you'll see
The device takes the form of a 2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy with a couple of SATA connectors on the end
Which makes sense, as a 3.5 bracket with a 3.5 hard drive and an SSD would not fit in a standard 3.5 bay.
It may be possible instead to dedicate one of your 3.5 bays to this, running SATA cables from your 3.5 drive to it (and then to the SATA controller). But then you've just used a full bay for one SSD and a silly gizmo.
Besides, have you ever heard of a 2.5" 2TB drive?
No, but we don't let reality get in the way of a good slashvertisement around here.
If only they made 2.5" SSD's then you could put THAT int he caddy and use a regular 3.5" in another bay. If only such magical things existed.
Re:What 2TB HD? (Score:4, Informative)
This adapter is for 2.5" hard drives - if you put a 3.5 drive in it, you wouldn't fit drive+adapter+SSD into a 3.5" bay. Who makes a 2TB 2.5" SATA drive currently? I am not aware of any...
Seriously... did not one read the article? You mount the fucking 2.5" drive in the caddy and mount your 3.5" HD where you would normally mount it and run a fucking cable from your HD to the caddy. Is this so fucking hard to get a grasp on? For christs sake.
Re:Pick the false statement (Score:5, Informative)
They are a bit confusing. The manual ( http://www.silverstonetek.com/downloads/Manual/storage/Multi-HDDBOOST-Manual.pdf [silverstonetek.com] ) though says, that the HDD has to be de-fragmented before usage. They don't mention other software, though they mention Windows here and there. The manual states though, that any OS supporting SATA will do.
(It's a Windows pussy thing again, you can freely ignore it).
For those that didn't RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
Some software is installed (Windows only) that makes the two drives look like one.
The most used files from the large drive are copies to the smaller SSD drive. When files cached on the SSD drive are requested, they are read from there, if they do not exist there the request is passed onto the bigger drive. If the file is being used enough it will be copied to the SSD drive at the same time as the information is getting sent to the computer. You will not get SSD drive speeds in this case.
Yes, this is just using a SSD drive as a cache.
The product does not come with SSD storage, you have to buy a SSD drive of your choosing as well as this caddy.
Re:Save your money... (Score:4, Informative)
USB drives speeds are in the 20-30 MB/s. SSD drives are 150-250 MB/s. Conventional HDDs are 50-100 MB/s
Re:Save your money... (Score:3, Informative)
Except that then you're at USB speeds instead of SATA speeds.
Re:Holy carp! (Score:3, Informative)
* read performance only
Re:Shouldn't this be integrated into the controlle (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft has a concept they call readydrive for this, mostly for laptops. It was released with vista (Not in XP and I never heard anything about Linux support) and seems to have kinda died. Last I heard anything about hardware was in 2007 with releases from the usual names (Samsung, Seagate, etc.), and I saw a few reviews (which appeared rather underwhelming (supposedly due to poor drivers), which resulted in a blame game between Microsoft and the manufactures over who's fault that was), but I don't think I ever saw the devices for sale.
There's also plans to include this type of functionality in the ATA-8 spec.
Re:Just a cache? (Score:3, Informative)
since SSD drives in fact ARE DRAM!
No. DRAM doesn't keep state across power loss, and it's a lot more expensive, just like the OP said.
Re:Save your money... (Score:3, Informative)
Who the hell creates a ZFS drive by using mkfs.zfs?
zpool create tank mirror sdb sdc works just fine under Debian.
Re:Pick the false statement (Score:3, Informative)
From what I read in the article, you have to defragment the big hard drive because the SSD will fill up with the data at the beginning of the drive. The read and write requests are just caught by whatever chip they use so when the OS requests a read from the start of the drive, the data from SSD is sent instead. Same for writes.
So the SSD acts just like level 2 cache for the first 32-64-whatever GB of the big disk. The rest will never be optimized.
Re:Pick the false statement (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Holy carp! (Score:3, Informative)
Likewise declaring someone stupid when it turns out YOU are the one who needs to do a little learning. Quoting the Windows Engineering Blog [msdn.com]:
Read that last sentence to yourself a few times, let it sink in. Now you can say sorry.
Indeed useful. I get the last 2-3GB's of accessed files at RAM speed, if I'm lucky. That doesn't help boot time, that doesn't help sleep time, and that doesn't help when I launch an app for the first time in a while. All of which ARE helped greatly by using an SSD. Why can't I have both?
Yeah, except I have one, and you're wrong. Caching is great for files you hit a lot, but you know what? My system drive has 40-50GB on it, and adding 40-50GB of RAM isn't really an option for most people, certainly not an economical one. You'll be lucky to get 10% of that in the cache - VERY lucky (seeing as all those media and data files will be pushing out the useful stuff you actually stand a chance of wanting to read again).
You seem to have a problem with SSDs, that's great, don't buy one. I wouldn't trade mine for 16GBs of RAM, never mind 8 (which is the equivalent cost).