Read more.An affordable path to SSD-like performance?
Read more.An affordable path to SSD-like performance?
For a drive like this, some real world boot/application timings would have been incredibly helpful, because it is obviously a very differnet product to a regular SSD. Whilst the synthetic results are helpful, when a drive is sold specifically as an "accelerator", it'd be nice to see examples of real PC use.
Also, what versions of Windows (or other OSs) are supported? Again, with the idea of it being an "accelerator", it would be useful to know whether it can be used with older PCs (which would only have slower SATA ports anyway) running Vista or even XP.
Noxvayl (25-04-2012)
Agree with Irien. Maybe I missed it, but any real world benchmarks of how long it takes to load windows with results in seconds would be great
From what little information that's available on the DataPlex software this looks like it's Windows7 only - although at least it's both 32bit and 64bit versions. So if you've got older Windows then I suspect you'll be out of luck. As to Mac and Linux - forget it.
Back to the article, this looks like an interesting product, but restricting it's use case to only the boot drive seems pretty short-sighted. I'm sure that there's a lot of folks (besides me of course) that'd like to apply this kind of caching solution to a large HDD-based "app" drive. As it is, I'm going to have to wait until the price of large SSD's falls to an affordable level.
Tempting, though you have to wonder how long it will last being thrashed around so much. Though if it does die it should all be fairly safe and at worst you would only lose the very latest data (I think)
Am I missing something? It's almost the same price as a SSD drive. The only thing this is doing is helping people who are lazy to reinstall OS on a new SSD.
Has FAIL written all over it?
what's the difference between this and a normal SSD? isn't it the software that's different and the hardware is basically the same? thus someone could make software to do the same thing using any standard SSD? or you could use one of these as a normal SSD? or am i missing something?
A) Some people have better things to do than reinstall Windows manage which files they want in an ssd and which ones they don't.
B) Any programs you installed on a hard drive that you sue regularly will get cached, particularly useful if say you have a bunch of games installed. The ones you played most recently and frequently will get a nice load time boost.
120GB costs £100. Assuming games are each 6GB, most people only have 5-10 games installed at any one time.
Fair point. Although like everything in life, there are trade-offs...some of which are massive.
All well and good until you think about how it works. You play games X and Y for 6 months.......you then install Z. You may have to keep running Z on and off for 6 months before the caching decides it should be cached and something else moved out. It is a rather extreme scenario that probably won't be hit but the concept is applicable and why I would never use an SSD for caching.
The day some simple algorithm can guess what I want to load fast, better then I can, I will switch. Until then it's just a really dumb tool that looks great in benchmarks and in use......at least in the short-term.......after 6-12 months of the system being used though?
The reviews (including Hexus) that I have seen for these caching SSDs has made me quite angry. They load something on a fresh install and then load it again.....and it loads really fast. most people will see that and think "wow!" without thinking about the long term implications.
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Well I would ignore benchmarks in this sort of thing and focus on a more qualitative approach. Windows will boot faster, your browser, media player etc will load faster etc. It might not boot quite as fast but will you really notice?
I don't think it's a simple case of throwing things in and out, the algorithms are likely quite smart and probably a bit more advanced than than an LRU that you might see in a cpu cache. In the case above on install it's highly likely that Z will get partially cached immediately.
I would hazard a guess that there is some sort of points/value system going on.
While in theory managing on one's own is more optimal it assumes that the user in questions knows what needs to be loaded. For example it may seem obvious to dump an entire OS on to an ssd, but the reality is that there's a whole heap of stuff just sitting there taking up valuable ssd space.
As with a cpu cache they sometimes seem a bit illogical and it is possible to program in a way that pretty much stops caches working properly, but the reality is that behaviour is usually predictable so we have algorithms to take care of it rather programmers allocating some data to on board memory and some to main memory.
I think the main thing here is convenience though, and it is more targeted at people with systems up and running who just want to make everything a bit snappier. It probably carries less merit in a fresh build. Each to their own
ocz agility 3 are £59 on scan right now - why would anyone want this when a faster drive is cheaper? and by default newer intel boards can do ssd caching
Would be a better bet with a new build, probably, but the software based caching systems are motherboard independent so can be used on older systems (and amd ones too...). Also with intel's srt you need to run as a RAID, not sure if that's something you can change if you aren't already doing so.
so if this drive is used to cache any drive. can you use it to cache an SSD drive? will it improve the speed of them too, or does it just work with mechanical spinny ones?
the 'primary volume' thing - is that only for C: drive, or is it any drive thats marked as primary in the disk management? because all of my 4 drives are marked as primary. and my 640GB games drive might want boosting up a bit and not the C: drive.
It takes quite a while reinstalling all 70 of my games (ive got another 40 or so not installed at the moment, but im working on it), so somethig like this would work wonders. Because a 500GB+ SSD costs waaaaay to much and i like having all my games installed at once so i can play what i want when i want. (thats one reason someone would want one of these, seen as people are asking that queston)
but that would mean i'd have to get a new motherboard, cpu and memory. and then reinstall everything etc. and at the end of the day still have less storage on my primary drive.
this seems like an ideal solution to speed up an aging system and i'm seriously tempted, particulary by the 30gig one. i have 1tb primary drive, loads of steam games etc so using that would surely be better than trying to micromanage install locations of individual games in steam.
What I would like to know though is if it speeds up boot time and more importantly resume from hibernation
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