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!"
Just a cache? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Your sig (Score:2)
Re:Your sig (Score:4, Insightful)
// You sound jealous...
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// You sound jealous...
I was merely pointing out a redundancy. I can see your 4-digit number as well, so it's understandable that you'd like to think everyone is jealous. Sorry to disappoint you.
A low number carries status, but the fact that someone got in early is no guarantee of their sagacity. I judge comments on their content, not on the pedigree of the commenter.
To put in another way, one doesn't need a low number to post a good comment, one only needs a brain.
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That's because you might confuse him with other people with low numbers, who only post things and never read anything...
Leaping forward into the 1980's (Score:2)
Haven't disk manufacturers been doing this forever, using faster memories to cache disk?
Digital's ESE series disks. RAM backed by disk with (iirc) write-behind caching. Expensive (memory was, after all) but in production in the 1980's. Welcome to the future.
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The main problem with HDD cache is it is so small with regards to the space it is caching. Yes, HDs have cache but 16MB and 32MB are common. There are a couple 64MB ones but that's it. That's for 500GB-2TB. Can't cache much data with that. Compare that to your CPU which tend to have somewhere in the 4-8MB of L2/L3 cache and usually RAM in the 2-8GB range. There's a lot less oversubscription of the cache which makes it works better. A system like this has the potential to work a lot better since you can equa
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"DRAM is yesterday's news. SSDs are the future. And they cost a lot more than a pile of memory chips, therefore they must be better. Order fifty." -- Some PHB
SSDs are cheaper per Gb then DRAM. Compare the price of a 64Gb SSD to 64Gb with of decent DDR2/3 RAM. The per-Gb price difference is likely to grow too as SSD prices are falling more sharply than DRAM prices at the moment.
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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.
Pick the false statement (Score:5, Insightful)
No software or driver update is required
Some software is needed to achieve the magic
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).
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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:Pick the false statement (Score:4, Funny)
So if you have more data stored on the HD than the size of the SSD, the performance of reading this data will be ever so slightly slower than reading from the HD directly.
Obviously you need a 2TB SSD in order to get the maximum performance gains from the device.
You mean like in... (Score:5, Informative)
Impressive is that it works with Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing new or impressive about this device.
Other than that it is compatible with applications and peripheral drivers designed to run on the majority operating system for home and office PCs, which has no support for ZFS.
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I remember them being shouted about with vista's release, being benchmarked with underwhelming results, resulting in the manufacturers playing a blame game with Microsoft over the poor results and who's responsibility it was to write good drivers for the drives, and the devices never actually appearing in stores, followed by the "vista sucks" brigade marching in and the entire concept getting buried as vista was the only thing that supported the drives.
I'll personally wait for the ATA-8 spec to be released
ReadyDrive is not always available (Score:2)
the majority operating system
ReadyDrive
As of last month, Windows XP still held two-thirds of market share [eweek.com]; Windows Vista and Windows 7 combined made up about one-fourth. Of these, compro01 pointed out [slashdot.org] that ReadyDrive requires Windows Vista or higher.
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a utility to do this in software easily for XP
...would not necessarily be installed on the machine into which you have transplanted the drive, possibly causing the other machine's view of the file system to be inconsistent.
why not put all the fast access stuff on the SSD and use hard disks for the bulky storage?
Ideally, that's what an inline cache like this is supposed to do, except automatically.
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Holy carp! (Score:2)
Well... it looks like there finally might be a reason to spend the money on an SSD. Up until now, it would be a nice speed boost, but the cost:performance ratio is so out of whack for SSDs, it just makes purchasing one ridiculous unless you have some very specific needs. For 95% of the people who have purchased them, they just want the biggest e-peen. That's fine and all, but my days of swinging around the biggest e-peen are over, so I've held off buying an SSD until the prices drop and capacity goes WAY
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"Very specific needs" like wanting my OS & apps to load as fast as possible? Putting OS, apps, pagefile etc on the SSD greatly improves system responsiveness. FLACs, MP4s & JPGs can stay on a spinning disk, I don't need to access them
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Putting your swap file on a RAM-Disk has long been the stereotypical geek example of human stupidity...someone who knows just enough to be very dangerous.
Additionally, if you have excess amounts of RAM available, every modern operating system will cache all disk reads, thereby offering instant acce
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Putting your swap file on a RAM-Disk has long been the stereotypical geek example of human stupidity...someone who knows just enough to be very dangerous.
Putting a swapfile on a regular ramdisk (that uses up system memory) is indeed stupid.
Putting swap on storage that is faster than a HDD but not directly usable as ram seems pretty sensible to me in certain situations (admittedly I don't belive those certain situations are the average users desktop).
One thing i've learnt is that the cost of a system has a h
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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]:
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"Very specific needs" like wanting my OS & apps to load as fast as possible? Putting OS, apps, pagefile etc on the SSD greatly improves system responsiveness. FLACs, MP4s & JPGs can stay on a spinning disk, I don't need to access them so quickly. A couple hundred bucks on a smallish SSD gives you a MUCH better performance kick that spending the equivalent on RAM or CPU, in my experience (provided of course you have at least an average spec machine to start with).
Haha... I don't know if you're trying to be serious or funny. If serious, then I kind of feel sorry for you, but your e-peen is huge, man, huge!
You quoted me saying "Very specific needs" and within 2 words, you use the word "want."
I said absolutely nothing about wants in the quoted text. Sure, I WANT a huge SSD array. However, I do not need one. Sure, you WANT your OS and apps to load as fast as possible, but you do not need it. Very few people NEED the speed of an SSD. The cost:performance ratio is o
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* read performance only
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Holy carp indeed... always loved that fish symbolism for the Christians.
Windows Only (Score:3)
In order to appear as one storage device in Windows, SilverStone has needed to use some software to...
There is the turn off for me. If I were to use something like this I would want an OS agnostic solution. Of course that would mean the caching would have to be done at the block level rather than the file level so it might not be able to be as bright (a block level cache manager wouldn't know to deallocate space on the SSD immediately when a file is deleted for instance), but it should be quite practical to design an algorithm that keeps the most often used blocks in the cache (the SSD) without the whole thing being needless wiped first time you copy a massive data file in (you wouldn't want that 20Gb file to be written to the SSD first time it is laid down, at the expense of dropping blocks frmo OS startup files and such, in case it is hardly ever accessed again - for instance an image of a blueray disc that you are copying to another disc would not want to touch the cache as it'll probably be written one, read once then wiped. How this block-based cache management algorithm would work in detail is left as an exercise for the reader...
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if I'm reading it right, it should still work but show two disks.
At which point you migth as well just plug the two drives directly into your main I/O controller and not bother with the extra device...
Waste of money and data safety (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, maybe you could do it safely if the device had RRD ram to handle the caching, SSD flash ram to handle power outages, a rechargable battery or ultra cap to provide power to write the RRD ram to flash ram after a power outage, and a controller to handle all this. You would need to implement all the normal os buffer caching and writebacks as well.
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Would it not be more cost effective to add more main memory to the machine?
I've never had a machine with capacity for more than 12GB RAM.
Also I have a concern that frequently updated blocks (like your file system superblocks) would not get written out to disk in a timely fashion.
That's a bigger problem with your RAM-based approach than with a flash-based one.
Now, maybe you could do it safely if the device had RRD ram to handle the caching, SSD flash ram to handle power outages, a rechargable battery or ultra cap to provide power to write the RRD ram to flash ram after a power outage, and a controller to handle all this.
You can get this with ZFS, a DRAM disk with a backup battery (volatile disks do exist that you load with DIMMs) and a caching raid controller with a backup battery.
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.
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Really it sounds and I RTFA, like an extension of RAID0.
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That's not how I see it. You have to defragment the big drive first, to have all executables and OS files at the start of the big disk. Then you use the software they give you to fill up the SSD with the data at the start of the big disk and after a reboot, reads and writes to those first 32 GB or so of the big disk will pass through the SSD.
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"Microsoft has a rocket launcher pointed at their feet and they think they can rocket jump."
Well, it worked in Marathon...
It seems logical (Score:2)
1- RAM systems work that way too: L1 cache, L2 cache, slow RAM, to compare to RAM cache (OS or controller), SSD, HD.
2- SSDs right now are very un-optimized: you've got to put, for example, your whole OS on them, even though I'd guess 20-30% of the files are actually read frequently enough to justify being on the SSD... and probably 5-10% of the files are *written* frequently enough to justify NOT being on the SSD. So seeing the SSDs as a cache rather than a hard disk makes a whole lot of sense, and probably
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Another question:
it seems SSDs are mainly good at boosting boot times, app load times, and game level loading. Why don't HDs load the OS in their cache during POST ? It must be quite simple to memorize which sectors get read first after power-up ?
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Breakthrough (Score:5, Funny)
Makes no sense... (Score:2)
From http://www.silverstonetek.com/qa/qa_contents.php?pno=HDDBOOST&area=usa [silverstonetek.com]
After the initial mirroring of data is completed, SSD and HDD will have the same front -end data. HDDBOOST's controller chip will then set data read priority to SSD to take advantage of SSD's much faster read speed. HDDBOOST's priority will be determined by the following rules:
1.When data is present on both drives, read from SSD.
2.When data is not present on both drives, read from HDD.
3.Data will only be written to HDD.
[...]
In no
Been There, Done That (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds a lot like the CacheCard from SiliconDust for Series1 TiVos [9thtee.com], except instead of an SDRAM DIMM it uses an SSD. And the CacheCard doesn't sit between the devices but instead connects to the TiVo motherboard's card-edge connector, provides an Ethernet port, and is designed only to cache a particular 0.5 GiB part of the drive.
But since the SDRAM loses its contents on power off, it does add significant time to test and fill at startup, while the SSD would be ready nearly immediately.
writes to disk (Score:2)
I am not sure about the speed advantage of reads from disk, given the problem of what to prioritize; but I could see the advantage of writes to disk.
Does that make any sense?
Why not just make an SSD cache controller? (Score:2)
An inline device that you plug in the SATA line. Should be the size of a USB memory stick with a connector at each end, or with an extension cord & connector at one end. Give it 2 to 8 GB of memory, again like a USB memory stick. Different sizes could be different price points.
Monitor all reads. Cache them
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Already do! rootfs on SSD, home/huge on disk (Score:3, Insightful)
There are alignment tricks with SSD around their large erase blocks, so you have to be careful partitioning.
Also, consumer-grade MHC SSDs are _not_ tremendously faster than spinning disks in transfer speed. Maybe 20%. Access time is where SSDs shine, 0.2 ms vs 8-10ms .
A simple scheme I use is to put the OS & small, frequent datafiles on SSD, and large [image] files on platter.
This might not help large databases with sparse access, but lots of RAM disk cache should be better. IIRC Seagate had a disk with flash boost, but had trouble with it.
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"Also, consumer-grade MHC SSDs are _not_ tremendously faster than spinning disks in transfer speed. Maybe 20%. Access time is where SSDs shine, 0.2 ms vs 8-10ms ."
My Intel consumer-grade SSD is pushing way more than 20% extra, especially on reads. These things do 250 MB/s, what hard drive gets even close to that?
Seagate, WD, others tried this. (Score:2)
In 2007 there was a whole movement toward hybrid drives -- it went nowhere.
Windows ReadyBoost (Score:2)
Windows ReadyBoost already does this. Plug-in an SSD, turn it on, and it caches frequently accessed files there. The last benchmark I read on it said it wasn't any faster though - probably because USB flash-drive SSDs are really slow since they are optimized for physical size, data density, and power consumption -- not speed.
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I don't see where a 2.5" HD is required - 3.5" should be fine. The gizmo looks like a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter tray, but the HD is not installed in the gizmo.
Besides, have you ever heard of a 2.5" 2TB drive?
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"Every time the system starts, HDDBOOST will initiate mirror backup automatically to ensure front-end data between the two drives are the same."
on every system start it's going to create a mirror backup, which sounded bad unless it works like Mirror RAID which doesn't take any time at all, it mirrors in real-time
So basically on every startup it mirrors the HD to the SSD, then pulls everything from the SSD until it needs to write data. Writing dat
... and it's wondows-only (Score:2)
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mod up tomhudson. This whole idea is dumb. Buy a second HDD and get raid 1 performance - twice as fast for most activity - not fault tolerant but neither is this solution. This is a new solution to a problem that already has a cheaper more performant solution.
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If you RTFA you'd find the 2.5" drive is for the SSD, not the rotational drive.
The bracket mounts the SSD inside of it, and then passes failed requests to the HDD, which is external to the bracket.
Re:Save your money... (Score:5, Informative)
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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
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Except that then you're at USB speeds instead of SATA speeds.
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Good operating system compatibility? (Score:2)
This seems like something a good operating system can implement with relative ease without even needing a custom tailored filesystem to do so.
"A good operating system" isn't compatible with thousands of proprietary third-party apps and device drivers designed for the majority operating system for home PCs. Nor can the data on a drive set up for use with "a good operating system" easily be transplanted into another PC whose operating system is not aware of the look-aside SSD cache.
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There is nothing here that requires an ASIC design level of logic other than maybe freeing some bandwidth on your SATA bus for the bleeding in and out of cache to disk.
Other than perhaps the use case of pulling the drive from one machine and seamlessly putting it in another machine for (say) virus removal or disaster recovery or the like. Without placing the cache inline, the other machine won't be aware of the partially-committed writes sitting on the SSD. But an inline cache will start to commit writes to the HDD as soon as power is restored.
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Why not wait for the I/O to complete?
Write-through caching, or not returning from sync() until the data has reached the HDD, is certainly possible. But it would kill the ability to transform (slow) random writes to the file system into (fast) sequential writes to the SSD and commit them in the background.
One disadvantage that some people have sort of eluded to was what happens when this device fails?
True, the failure modes of an inline cache would resemble those of a RAID controller. But what happens when the electronics in the HDD fail? As I understand it, it's more likely that the platters will fail first.
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Why not just do a full disk sync when powering down?
How long would a backup battery in the adapter have to keep spinning the platters after system power down for that to happen? But I guess it could be worked around: flush the cache on power-up, which needs only a working power supply, not a working motherboard.
Who knows how well this thing can even perform when doing the caching, does anybody have any realworld performance data for this?
Tom's or [H] might once it comes out.
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Who the hell creates a ZFS drive by using mkfs.zfs?
zpool create tank mirror sdb sdc works just fine under Debian.
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zfs-fuse> is not available for general use.
I have no problem trusting my data to ZFS in FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. (Where the commands to create a zfs 'file system' are the same.
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Screw what is required to do it, I'm more concerned about trying to find a 2TB drive that has decent reliability. So far, every 2 TB hard drive I have looked at has had a lot of problems, at least according to online reviews from multiple sources (forums, newegg, IT guys I know, etc.) Obviously, the people who complain tend to be the loudest, but still...I haven't come across a single 2TB drive that didn't have a LARGE number of complainers.
The same can't be said for 1TB or 1.5TB drives.
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Read it again and look at the pictures. The caddy is the size of a 3.5" drive, in which you install a 2.5" SSD. That is what they mean by a "2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy".
Re:2.5" drives only (Score:5, Funny)
Read it again and look at the pictures. The caddy is the size of a 3.5" drive, in which you install a 2.5" SSD. That is what they mean by a "2.5in to 3.5in hard disk caddy".
AGAIN!? How dare you accuse me of reading TFA. Are you trying to ruin my /. cred?
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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.
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I'd rather it not. That way when I upgrade the hard drive, I can toss the old HD and keep the more expensive SSD part.
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Hence the "Derrr nevermind" post I made six minutes before you posted this diatribe.
Once again, you are full of fail. You don't think that maybe that was written just AFTER you made your uninformed post and PRIOR to when you decided to actually read the article and then post a correction?
Gosh, I dunno... maybe. We aren't in an IRC chat room. I know that's kind of hard to grasp for people with short attention spans, but really... we aren't. This is a message forum, it's not real time.
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LOL, nerd fight. Someone call a doctor, they might get a paper-cut.
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Watch the movie - all will become clear:
http://www.silverstonetek.com/products/p_contents.php?pno=HDDBOOST&area=usa [silverstonetek.com]
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No, it's a simple version of cache that doesn't actually do proper caching. All it does is preloading, and only over part of the device. Most of the volume of the hard disk will have no performance boost at all. You'd almost certainly be better off just having two devices, and using junction points on Windows or soft links on UNIX to move the frequently accessed files to the smaller disk.
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While I agree that you might be better off managing what is on your SSD yourself just by treating it as a separate disk drive. With a good 3rd party defragmenter, this could actually be useful.
For example My Defrag [mydefrag.com] can be scripted to move files into specific places on your drive based on just about any criteria. So you could set it up to move your OS, Program, Temp, Swap, Hibernate and any other recently accessed files to the start of the disk. Then move everything else to the end.
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.
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The 2.5" caddy is for the SSD and includes the controller card. A traditional drive bay is required in ADDITION to this caddy (which fits a second 3.5" bay adjacent to the HDD).
The man with the foul mouth is correct.
total internal PC space required is 2 x 3.5" bays. You can absolutely use a 2TB drive and a small SSD with this kit.
RTMFA already (Score:5, Interesting)
They even have a fucking picture. [bit-tech.net]
The 2.5 caddy is for your SSD. Mount your 3.5 wherever you like.
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I'm not going to defend the product. I don't care if you hate it. But please - hate it for the right reasons at least.
You have now apparently read the article (or at least looked at the picture), and you now hate it for the right reasons.
My job here... is done.
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Did you expect the extra componentry to somehow consume zero space?
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It's a caddy that goes into a 3.5" bay, and accepts a 2.5" SSD. Your regular spinning HD goes into its normal 3.5 bay, and connects to the caddy.
Thank you for your attention. Can we now go on and discuss the interesting things about that gizmo ?
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You are a fucking idiot and can not read.
Clearly, you are the truest source of all wisdom. You are a gentleman of caliber previously unattained. I am not worthy of your kindness, dear sir and I bow to your civility.
Please do not continue to use the Internet, as even a short article is apparently beyond your comprehension.
You have graced us with so much kindness in so little space.
one of the ultimate forms of demonstration of your rank stupidity
Why thank you kindly sir. I hope you could be so kind as to continue to heap praise upon me.
Please destroy your computer now, or at the very least disconnect your computer from the internet so that you do not harm other people with your base ignorance
I am so glad that you devoted so much time to discussing the topic at hand
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tl;dr
Indeed you are a scholar and a gentleman. I will cherish this wonderful conversation for the rest of my days and then some. I hope you a lifetime of peace and happiness for the kindness you have bestowed upon me and indeed the whole of the world. We all could never be adequately grateful for a kind soul such as yours.
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My guess is, it won't. It must be a dumb cache that just monitors which sectors/clusters are most often read, and caches those.
It may be better than the current use of SSDs though, which is to put a whole OS on them even though there's many parts of the OS that are barely used. If I had an SSD, IE8 would be on it !
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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 thin
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I am guessing it would be the end that's at the front