On: Revisiting Solid State Hard Drives

[seunosewa]

Did anyone else notice that the performance of the Seagate Momentus XT is awful compared to all the solid state drives? It's only about 20% faster than a regular hard disk drive (the SSDs are about 1000% faster, according to Jeff's own chart). It's an awful, awful recommendation. If you want the performance of a solid state drive, buy a solid state drive.

[AndrewDucker → seunosewa]

It's apparently not much faster than a physical drive for random data traffic, but much faster for loading frequently opened files and booting the PC.

[weaksauce → AndrewDucker]

It's basically like the cache in your cpu now except it's a bit smarter about storing what goes in the flash memory.

L1 = the 32MB RAM

L2 = 4GB Flash

finally the 500GB HD

[Splines → seunosewa]

It'd be nice if there existed a thing that acted like the SSD part of the Seagate Momentus XT. That way I could hybrid-ize my existing drives and have greater flexibility for future upgrades.

[wipt → Splines]

Check out ARC, ZFS has a implementation of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Replacement_Cache

[nitrogen → Splines]

There's the HDDBOOST, from SilverStone, though it almost sounds like you were just begging someone to link to it ;)

Some benchmarks: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=silve...

[Splines → nitrogen]

Hrm. I was hoping that such a device would perform better.

Yeah, I was hoping someone would link something. In this case, I didn't really know what I was looking for. What do you call a doohickey that does that sort of thing?

[nitrogen → Splines]

I'm not personally aware of any specific name for it, but I used search terms in the neighborhood of "SSD hybrid adapter" to find the Phoronix article.