Hybrid drive

[Donald]

I see Seagate has a hybrid drive (part SSD and part normal hard drive). The price is very reasonable for a 500GB. This would be to replace a laptop hard drive to boost the speed hopefully by a lot.

Any experience or thoughts?

I guess it all comes down to how good their cache algorithm is to use the SSD part as a cache. Almost reminds me of ReadyBoost.

 

[PandaBear]

From what I heard it is not going to do anything significant because the bottle neck is still in the mechanical part of the drive.

 

[greenaccord02]

They need to make something like that but with built in automatic data tiering. If a company could make a hybrid drive and write a program to do block level data tiering on chip they'd make a million bucks. I'd buy one, anyway. I guess it'd have to be a pretty smart drive with a decent amount of storage and processing to handle the metadata, but it would be really cool.

Of course, I say all this and there is probably already a product on the market.

 

[PandaBear]

greenaccord,

It is impossible to do data tiering in block level. The applications (and OS) have to be able to tier it based on the importance of the data, and if you do it, you have to redesign all the software on top of it to take advantage of the speed.

It would be much easier to just build 2 drives with one connection (or 2 partitions), and let the user determine how to tier the data.

 

[Donald]

Originally Posted By: PandaBear
From what I heard it is not going to do anything significant because the bottle neck is still in the mechanical part of the drive.


Go to Amazon and read the reviews. For data that can be cached (data to be read) it seems like its doing a fairly decent job. It does not need to go to the hard drive if it can find it on the cache, and the cache is 4GB and non volatile. It really speeds up the boot process.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

I subscribe to the dual drive setup, 80GB SSD (or even 60GB), then a secondary SATA disk of your choice. Put all user profiles on the second drive. Speed is amazing, even only with a SATA-I controller.

Then disable pre-fetch, an important step, for the SSD disk.

 

[Donald]

The hybrid drive I was referring to was for a laptop where you can only have a single internal hard drive for the most part.

 

[Rand]

they are very overpriced.

A SSD-boot / regular-for data setup works best.


inbetween is the Z68 chipset solution that uses a small SSD to cache your hdd.. Its much better than a hybrid drive but not as good as seperate drives.

Its a very good use of a 32gb ssd drive though.(which IMO is too small to use as a boot drive)