News SilverStone Announces Hybrid SSD-Hard Disk Device

Looks pretty sweet, can't wait to see the speed test

 

This looks very cool, now if they could make a version that lets me connect my sas drives to an ssd and still use my sas controller this could get interesting. For example it would be cool to see what sort of speed boost I could get from putting together two 15k sas drives in raid 0 with sas cach drives! Also its use with storage drives is very cool, as for the speed side I wonder how much it could boots the performance of my first gen raptors. Perhaps if paired with some small cheep ssds I could make my old raptors fast enough to be worth wild again. On servers I could take the power savings of a slower rpm 2tb drives and match them with some decent ssds so that I can still get the speed I want from 7200 rpm but with a lower power combination! There are just so many possibilities, I am really excited!

 

Hmmmm something sceptical is twingling deep inside....

But if it works and doesn't need software (bt says it doesn't, Silverstone don't say) then I could see myself using one of these on my primary data drive. My main drive is a 120gb SSD, but a lot of stuff sits on one of my 1tb drives so a "cache" for that would be good.

 

I've two wd hdds in raid 0, if i got two of these would that also work in raid0?. Like the idea tho.

 

hmm... anyone else though about daisy-chaining these?

 

One important point - and i have an SSD on my pc so i found this out: one of the nice things in Win 7 is that the OS recognizes the SSD IF and ONLY IF you use the microsoft driver for that sata port. Why's that important? two main reasons: 1. automatic defrag will be shut off for SSDs (which you can do manually) and 2. the OS will use the SSD "Trim" command which will make the drive last longer and work better (to simplify stuff). You can't do that manually.

Search for SSD TRIM in a search engine or wiklipedia and you can read about it. If this somewhat nifty product does not let the microsoft driver recognize the SSD that may be a bad thing. Just something to be aware of - I don't really know the guts of what this product it.

Another thing: if you use this adapter will the Intel SSD toolbox still recognize the SSD? Obviously this is only important if you use an Intel SSD but it could be another issue.

 

Am I the only person who doesn't see the point of this device?

Most users have Windows, then they have files, music & videos. Logic tells me that most would put the Windows OS on the SSD, and put the music, videos and files on the mechanical drive.

So, how is buddying up a 64gig SSD with a 1.5 Terabyte with this device drive gonna speed things up? Movies will still be hosted on the mechanical drive, in which you'll see a slight delay whilst starting the movie, due to the drive spinning up and locating the data.

If anything, I reckon this device would slow down your operating system, as random windows files get squeezed off the SSD and shoved somewhere on the Mechanical drive...

My two cents.

 

Yeah, I'm not getting it. Maybe it uses some software to monitor your most frequently used files and sticks them on the SSD as needed, but... eesh, I don't know. That sounds like something the user could easily do on his or her own anyway.

 

I'm interested, but not convinced... It would be a nice way to give a boost to the drive that's currently hosting my steam folder, but i'm curious how this thing will get 1TB of data off the HDD faster then the HDD alone could... the question about uncached data being possibly slower then normal will hold me from trying at the moment.

Oh, and when you do test these, i'd be mighty interested to see if these can be put in RAID.

 

If it works.... its like super ****ing ready boost. I like it I may give it a shot.

 

Article says:
"In order to appear as one storage device in Windows, SilverStone has needed to use some software to con the OS."

Image says:
"No software or driver update is required to enjoy the added speed"

Ok then....

 

The whole idea is encouraging

Maybe we could be seeing manufacturers … hybrid a SSD / HDD in a single drive, in the near future

 

I can see a point in this if your building a system for a customer or friend who doesn't really know how a pc system works but ask for a fast system. You could just pair a small cheap SSD With a 2Tb HDD. It would then make the system easier for them to use having only 1 drive but with quicker drive speeds than there friends systems.
On the other hand i think most system builders would be better off using the small cheap SSD for there OS and the 2Tb HDD for everything else.

There's alot of questions i'd like to have answered about this !

 

I think the underlying technology does not require any software. However if you want the maximum benefit (as well as an initial setup process without re-installing) then software does that.

So for example without having the software, the device probably follows a simple algorithm that the most recently used data is stored in the SSD, and the oldest stuff is deleted to make room for the new stuff. However, with the software the intelligence increases - so that the *most used* data is stored in the SSD, rather than *most recently* used.

I think it's fantastic - the problem with Intel's version of this is that the cache was way too small. Even with a rudimentary algorithm, given 32-64GB of 'cache' you have a fighting chance that Windows and all of your most used apps will almost permanently be stored on the SSD. Windows boot and all your main apps will load in record times. Your personal files and other files that you only access every so often will be stored on the HD. You basically get the speed boost of an SSD, without the lack of storage space. It's pretty ideal until SSDs become cheaper per GB than a mechanical drive.

I would like to see a version that uses DIMMs instead of SSDs for those people who want insane performance.

 

Update There's confusion as to whether the SSDBoost requires software or not. The slide used in the story (which came from the press release) says not, but a subsequent slide from the same release talks about a 'Special Software Utility'. We've asked SilverStone for clarification, but we may need to wait until we get our hands on a sample to know what the situation is. Stay tuned!

 

hmmz. Why not make HD's with larger cache sizes? Or better yet Make a HDD where a SDD 8GB SSD sits on the bottom (called a BHDD). It would be cheaper then a SSD and the HD would be almost as fast as a SSD (if you want to believe the HDBoost Silverstone talk)

You could get a 2TB BHDD for around 200 euro with the speed of a SSD. I will certainly buy one yesterday.

 

I think it's fairly straight forward as Boogle says, it has default setting which work without software but with software it can be tuned or indeed become 'intelligent' in what it caches, I just hope it's intelligent caching is configurable, unlike superfetch which pisses me off as I want to tell it what to keep preloaded.

 

When you do a review of this could you try testing the performance variation with SSD size? Probably not something thats easy to do quantitatively but it would be useful to know whether there's a great advantage in going for a (say) 32GB over a 16GB.

I think that the advantage of this will be not that you can get SSD speeds without reinstalling but rather that it automatically selects the files that get used most often to go on the SSD. This should mean that only those windows files that are frequently used go on the SSD. Some way of forcing the page file and memory image for hibernation onto the SSD would be good too.

Moriquendi

 

Why SSD and not RAM? I almost want this.

This is cool but what I really want is something like the Gigabyte i-RAM that sits in front of a hard drive like this does. Let me shove 32GB of RAM as a cache instead of an SSD.

The average person can get a similar boost by getting a computer with more RAM and disabling swap/virtual memory. If you've already done that and maxed out system RAM then I can see that things like the hddboost and i-RAM start to make sense. My server already is maxed at 48GB of RAM and has fast drives already so it makes sense to consider the hddboost and i-RAM. I wonder how this would play with my RAID5 if each disk had one of these on it. Doing that and using the i-RAM for temp files might offer some speed boost and possibly extend hdd life.

If they could come up with removable drawers that support these that would be an awesome idea. I like to be able to remove drives without shutting down and cracking open the system and drawers (or better yet ejectable hdd) would be just the thing.

 

The I-ram came in a 5.25" bay in version 2. There are also Acards ramdisks, Link, but they're not cheap. Personally I think it's a waste to connect something as fast as DRAM through a SATA interface that's limited to 3Gbps when the memory can be capable of 10 or 20 times that.

Moriquendi