The roots for the concept of SSD caching have to do with OS paging. The OS paging algorithms are very, very efficient at guessing which portions of RAM aren't going to be accessed again and copying those pages to the disk. Misses are very rare (although still agonizingly slow, as anyone who remembers computers from a 5+ years ago when you had so little RAM)
Well, it would be great to pair up a large standard hard drive and an SSD and to unify the two under a single drive letter. Similar paging algorithms would be used to figure out which sectors of the hard drive to cache on to the SSD.
Upsides :
1. Almost all of the performance benefits of an SSD, with the space of a hard drive.
2. Very small SSDs would still provide a substantial performance boost. A cheap 40-60 gb ssd (as long as it uses an Intel or Sandforce controller) would provide a huge speed boost to a 2 TB + hard drive.
3. This would make it practical for Dell and the other OEMS to bundle an SSD in to their standard offerings. Finally, those shitty Dells that corporate America uses everywhere won't be so agonizingly slow. (well, until the corporation loads them up with Malware like antivirus and tattling programs, that is)
4. Laptops could come standard with a small compact ssd to turbocharge the glacially slow hard drive that comes with a typical laptop.
Downsides :
1. If the hard drive dies, you lose ALL your data.
2. If the SSD dies under load, you lose the most recent file writes. Syncing to the hard disk would only be done periodically. (if they want to maximize performance, that is)
3. CPU usage by the Intel driver. Drive volumes might be restricted to Windows only, difficult to run recovery tools if something goes wrong.
4. Still faster, simpler, and more reliable to just buy an ssd or two for all of your applications and OS. Movies, backups, downloads, and other data that can be accessed linearly goes on the hard drive. Not a good idea for enthusiast, desktop users like 90% of the folks here.
Well, it would be great to pair up a large standard hard drive and an SSD and to unify the two under a single drive letter. Similar paging algorithms would be used to figure out which sectors of the hard drive to cache on to the SSD.
Upsides :
1. Almost all of the performance benefits of an SSD, with the space of a hard drive.
2. Very small SSDs would still provide a substantial performance boost. A cheap 40-60 gb ssd (as long as it uses an Intel or Sandforce controller) would provide a huge speed boost to a 2 TB + hard drive.
3. This would make it practical for Dell and the other OEMS to bundle an SSD in to their standard offerings. Finally, those shitty Dells that corporate America uses everywhere won't be so agonizingly slow. (well, until the corporation loads them up with Malware like antivirus and tattling programs, that is)
4. Laptops could come standard with a small compact ssd to turbocharge the glacially slow hard drive that comes with a typical laptop.
Downsides :
1. If the hard drive dies, you lose ALL your data.
2. If the SSD dies under load, you lose the most recent file writes. Syncing to the hard disk would only be done periodically. (if they want to maximize performance, that is)
3. CPU usage by the Intel driver. Drive volumes might be restricted to Windows only, difficult to run recovery tools if something goes wrong.
4. Still faster, simpler, and more reliable to just buy an ssd or two for all of your applications and OS. Movies, backups, downloads, and other data that can be accessed linearly goes on the hard drive. Not a good idea for enthusiast, desktop users like 90% of the folks here.
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