News HighPoint card enables DIY hybrid drives

HighPoint's RocketHybrid card lets you combine any hard drive and SSD to make a DIY hybrid drive.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/02/01/highpoint-announces-rockethybrid/1

 

Unless it's drastically cheaper than, say, an actual hybrid drive or an SSD + HDD... What's the point?

 

@ liratheal unlikely to be cheaper than an SSD + HDD as you need both of them plus the controller card.
Its price/performance will determine its worth.

 

@ liratheal Where you already have the SSD or HDD and want to combine it with a new HDD or SSD respecitvely.

 

I guess it allows you the option to later upgrade the HDD to a larger one, without having to re-invest in another SSD.. or indeed when the SSD 'wears' out you only replace the SSD part. Initially more expensive but perhaps long term benefits?

 

Silverstone have had something like this for a while now. Nothing new.

 

This is not new?
The SSD is used as cache for the mechanical drive. Adaptech have had their maxCache products out for some time now and google will say that Raidon launched a similar product in february 2010.
In the raid solutions, you have ZFS that will do this with L2ARC (or Adaptec MaxIQ). A solution used by I.E. insulin maker Novo Nordisk in their protein database.

So why is this news?

 

Just because the idea is older doesn't mean its not news. It is a new product, which is likely to be quite affordable and from a brand that many have come to know. It even states in the article that the idea is not new.

Wars have been happening since the start of civilisation, doesn't mean a new, more exciting war isn't news

I am personally worried about the "cache" part, is it a volatile cache or is it stored on the ssd as you would any normal data. If it is volatile then I would sure hate to lose several GB due to a power cut.

 

might be a good way of re-using your outdated GEN 1 SSD's that, I for one, paid ~£2 per gigabyte for when I upgrade my primary raid array. Depends on the price point of the card when it comes to market.

 

I think this is actually a pretty good idea. Get a fast 40Gb ssd and team it with a 2tb 5400rpm mechanical eco drive and you'll be laughing.
Good SSD like performance with the capacity of a mechanical.
Or am i missing something?

 

This is very interesting

 

For many people familiar with advanced RAID cards this is nothing new. Just like pointed out above - Adaptec MaxIQ solution. Actually quite good, as long as you pick your own disks, not the ones with Adaptec sticker (bloody insane premium $$$ for absolutely nothing extra LOL).

 

Got to agree, this doesn't seem like anything too new. People have been sticking large amounts of RAM in their RAID cards for years, to similar effect.

Also, as a long time highpoint RAID card user: they're crap.

 

yup yup and theres worked fairly well too.

 

Will this be tested as I'd like to see the results...

 

hmm a nice (((crucial real ssd c300 64gb + western digital velociraptor 600gb))) for os mmm sheer wickedness MONSTER ...

 

Madness.... multiple points of failure, just like my striped 74GB Raptors that are slowly but surely failing....

 

Same thought here, twice as many places to fail for a single drive

 

ok - from a bit of googling the MaxCache and MaxIQ seem silly expensive hardware raid solutions costing the £000's that proper hardware raid cards usually do. Presumably there are intelligent algorithms at work there, or at least there should be.

The silverstone thing on the other hand seems truly pointless to me - it just mirrors as much as it can from the HDD to the SSD but apparently without any clever software at work - the first 32 or 64 GB written to the HDD is written to the SSD, however big the SSD happens to be. It won't then check to see how often you actually use that data as against other date on the HDD

But if this thing has intelligent software that caches properly (e.g. like the seagate momentus, but you get to choose the size of the cache) but yet only costs £30 - I'd be interested. That would let me buy a 60-80gb drive, and hopefully it would just learn fairly quickly what game on steam I was playing at the moment and quietly shift that across to the SSD for me.

 

You'd be better off using the SSD as a boot drive and the raptor as a paperweight. Or trade it to some impressionable / stupid kid for a 2TB 5900RPM drive for all your games / data.