Building a "hybrid" HDD/SSD/Ramdrive - possible?

[grepawking]

I was looking at some WD 4TB drives and I came across one of their "blue" line models that was 4TB but also had 8GB of NAND Flash. The model is called "WD Blue SSHD" - desktop hard drive - 5400prm, SATA 6Gbps, 64MB cache - 3yr warranty - model WD40E31X with an astonishing price tag of $300 -390 depending upon where if is purchased.

Under features it lists:
Up to 5x faster than traditional 5400 rpm HDDs
Designed for power PC users, creative professionals, gamers and system builders
Usage - Ideal for Servers

For this price, I'm wondering if there isn't a way that I could incorporate some kind of 8-16GB stick of RAM (like a RAM DRIVE, completely dedicated 8-16GB of memory for a "middleman" in between the 4TB drive and the CPU. Or if there is another way or using some other SSD drive from 8GB up to 64GB in conjunction with the 4TB drive. I just cant' see how this would be impossible or extremely difficult, as I've used Ramdrives before and they have made some systems amazingly fast in some areas (when I had 32-64GB of dedicated RAM Drives working with either a very fast SSD or RAID 0 SSD - and even some good quality physical HDD's).

I just don't like the idea of using their blue model for this. Seagate had a similar product years back and I thought it was kind of a dog, though my application might not have suited this.

Does anyone know if something like this can be made from 2 other parts and if so, how would a hybrid drive be made?

 

[UsandThem]

This question has @BonzaiDuck written all over it.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/fiddling-with-the-newest-primocache-3-0-2-version.2539710/

 

[cfenton]

Primo Cache can do this.

Those SSHDs are mostly junk. 8GB of NAND isn't nearly enough to be useful. I wouldn't bother with anything less than 32GB of NAND.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Primo Cache can do this.

Those SSHDs are mostly junk. 8GB of NAND isn't nearly enough to be useful. I wouldn't bother with anything less than 32GB of NAND.

Weeeeelll... realistically, any amount of NAND will make a pretty good write cache, if that's a bottleneck for you.

But, yeah. With game installs over 50GB now, it's not of much use as a read cache except maybe to lower boot times or something. Nice for benchmarks, not useful day to day.

 

[cfenton]

Weeeeelll... realistically, any amount of NAND will make a pretty good write cache, if that's a bottleneck for you.

But, yeah. With game installs over 50GB now, it's not of much use as a read cache except maybe to lower boot times or something. Nice for benchmarks, not useful day to day.

Do you mean if you were running out of RAM and writing to the page file? Or is there something I'm not thinking of? 8GB would be useless for any substantial sustained data transfer.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Do you mean if you were running out of RAM and writing to the page file? Or is there something I'm not thinking of? 8GB would be useless for any substantial sustained data transfer.

No, I mean if you have to write some random data to a drive, don't want to wait long, and want a synchronous write (so, no ram-based write caching - because that's volatile.)

Database servers would generate that sort of load.

 

[cfenton]

No, I mean if you have to write some random data to a drive, don't want to wait long, and want a synchronous write (so, no ram-based write caching - because that's volatile.)

Database servers would generate that sort of load.

Fair enough, I was thinking of client workloads.

 

[Ratman6161]

Read about StoreMI for AMD systems. Its just a re-brand of a product called FUZEDRIVE. Its now also available for Intel based systems.

http://www.enmotus.com/fuzedrive

This lets you combine an SSD with a hard drive and also allocate up to 4GB of RAM as a cache.