Bit of advice please. I've already got a 512Gb SSD (Crucial M4) - lucky me - in combo with an X58 sabretooth mobo. Now, come the end of this month I'll be upgrading to Ivy Bridge socket 1155 - from the 1366 set up - and will be moving to a Z77 mobo - probably the Sabretooth again. Clearly, I could just stick with the Crucial M4 as the main drive - but I could - for a relatively small amount of money, buy another 60Gb SSD - and enable the Intel cache "thingummy". This would give me a 60Gb SSD cache drive, and a 512Gb SSD main drive. The principal question I need answering is - can I do this ? I assume so. The secondary question, which you'll all be tempted to answer is - why would I want to do this ? – and I’m not sure I know what the answer to this is – mostly just because I can. I'm not envisaging much – if any – performance gain, maybe some - but meh - so what. One of the reasons I’m upgrading from 1366 to 1155 is to make the most of SATA 6Gbps – the X58 mobo relies on a marvell controller to do this, which in turn does not support TRIM – and so I’ve currently got the M4 connected to the 3Gbps SATA, which is deeply unsatisfying. Ta in advance
SSD Caching is designed to be used with a mechanical HDD, using caching with another SSD is kinda pointless. The speed boost honestly won't be worth it. Just moving from a 3Gbps port to a 6Gbps one will give you a small speed boost. SSD RAID0 is the best way to go faster than a single SSD.
Yeah, but that would require me buying another Crucial M4 512Gb - which is a large slap Cheers nonetheless, I can do it, but there would be little point - that's what I thought. (still gonna do it though)
it would actually be slower... Well, you'd be reading x amount of data from a faster drive 512GB & writing it to a slower 60/64GB one - 1st speed loss (albeit a temporary one until it decided what would be generally cached)... ...& then reading the data from the slower 60/64GB drive than a faster 512GB one - 2nd speed loss. i guess you 'could' get an improvement from caching with a top end 120/128GB or 240/256GB SSD... ...but if you were going to spend the money on that you'd be better off running it as a separate SSD - probably something akin to splitting off the OS/apps use vs games installations.
Personally... I would just save that extra money and spend it on a program or game for your computer .
To answer the question of whether SSD caching would work on the non-boot drive, I looked up Intel's SRT guide. One of the steps mentioned, "select the HDD (or RAID volume) to be accelerated. It is highly recommended to accelerate the system volume or system disk for maximum performance." What that tells me is that it's possible to select ANY HDD or RAID array to associate the SSD cache with. According to what I read about how the technology's implemented, the system caches things based on logical block address which means it wouldn't matter very much what kind of data is being cached so I wouldn't expect problems with trying to cache a non-boot drive. Also regarding the speed impact, as long as the cache drive is a faster drive than the M4 there shouldn't be a problem of decreased performance. However, given that the options for stuff faster than the M4 aren't a very significant step up, you probably wouldn't notice the speed increase as people have said.
Where are you getting that from??? Unless you're cherry picking the b/ms (ie only using atto for SFs) or overly focusing on some unusual i/o type, i've never seen a 60/64GB SSD come close to a 512GB M4 overall... ...& certainly not for this usage. [Edit] in thinking on, i've got a feeling that, even if a marginally faster SSD were used for caching, the software & system overhead from using isrt may end up slowing it down as well... isn't part of the reason why either consumer SSDs *can* be an effective cache for HDDs & ramdrives *can* be an effective cache for SSDs (or HDDs) is the vast speed differential outweighs overheads???
Crucial 512 M4 - 500 Mb/s / 260 Mb/s OCZ 64GB Synapse Cache - 550 Mb/s / 490 Mb/s am I looking at the wrong measures ?
You seem like you have plenty of money, just try it and if it doesn't work, use the SSD as a doorstop.
Yes, completely. The figures you should be reading are the ones that they don't put on the box. Unfortunately I don't have time for a detailed post, but in short, you'll be caching your m4 to a far slower drive than itself, decreasing performance for virtually all scenarios.
Yeah, the Synapse is basically an Agility 3 without raise that's massively over provisioned (ie you get 50% of the total nand) to allow for the increase writing that is likely to occur when used for caching... ...so, other than some software issues (which are not down to OCZ but the company who makes the software for a host of caching SSDs - & aren't exactly common) & the possible incompatibility that can occur with any 6Gb/s SF, it's a decent option for caching a HDD... ...but has all of the speed limitations of the async nand SFs... ...so double the size & compare real life b/ms. Whilst it's not 100% accurate as Anand don't have the 512GB M4 in their comparisons (there's always slight differences in performance between the 256 & 512GB models), this demonstrates that the Synapse is slower... Depending on the OS & whatnot, there is no need to use a specialised caching SSD though (although extra OP by under partitioning is a really very good idea)... ...so you 'could' buy a 120/128GB or 240/256GB SSD that actually performs better irl... (though again, i'm really not convinced that this would improve anything d.t. overheads where there isn't a magnitudinous difference in speeds with the device that's acting as the cache) ...but you'd much better off buying using this 2nd SSD as a normal SSD - for most people using it for the OS & Apps.
What PocketDemon said, word for word. The issue with SSDs is that the quoted speeds are theoretically correct; it is all dependent on the circumstances. The rated performance numbers are based around compressible data, which gives synchronous NAND SF drives the upper hand; with incompressible data, however, they're nothing special. As a result, the m4 doesn't have the fastest rated performance numbers because it can't match the SF drives with certain compressible data tasks, but with incompressible data it is one of the fastest of drives, either beating or wiping the floor with SF-2281 based drives, and trading hits with the newly released Vertex 4. Its access times are also the fastest on the market (though we're talking such fast times that any advantages here are largely irrelevant, with crap SSDs still being insanely fast). If we're talking about real-world performance, the m4 is right up there. Coupled with great pricing and reliability, it's still a sensible choice. EDIT: Off-topic, PocketDemon, that's one hell of an Internet PC xD
Mmmmm... Just for clarity... The incompressible data stuff with the SFs is only *that* valid if you're actually dealing with huge amounts of incredibly incompressible data - irl most data is neither one extreme or the other & a high end 120GB SF will out perform a M4 unless you've got an unusual usage... it's just as incomplete to *only* be comparing at AS SSD/CDM b/ms as it is to *only* be looking at ATTO ones... Overall, looking at real world b/ms then you will normally find that the high end 120/240GB SFs, the 128/256GB Corsair Performance Pros & the 128/256GB Samsung 830s are faster than any of the M4s... ...& 'if' OCZ sort out the low QD sequential reads then the V4 would also be noticebly faster... ...not that it's slow overall, but this is too much of an issue imho. Otherwise, the 'internet machine' is just most of my old 'proper machine' - every time i build a new 'proper' one then the internet machine gets better (although the old internet one had half the memory & a QX9650, so it wasn't exactly that slow). Okay, it does do quite a bit of quick audio ripping & batch conversion & quick lossless video editing & stuff rather than just accesing t'internet... ...but it is probably overkill... Touch wood though, in the next few months then it'll be my SB build that'll have its use downgraded...
