On Wed, 18 Jul 2012 01:32:19 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

On 17/07/2012 22:44, SteveW wrote:

I've recently fitted an SSD Cache. The SSD connects as a normal HDD and
indeed can function as one, but this is not recommended. It comes with a
licence for a piece of software (for Windows 7) which over the course of
a couple of reboots and time running, learns which files should be
cached and uses the SSD to serve them up. It gives a significant speed
boost without sacrificing the large capacity of a HDD.

There are also hybrid SSD / HDD drives out there like the Seagate
Momentus. Includes SSD acceleration / caching in the same package as the
hard drive.

Having benchmarked them and used a 500gig Momentus XT for quite a
while, they're about twice as fast in practice as a normal 2.5"
7200rpm. Which means they're about the same speed as a 3.5" 7200rpm...

A nice upgrade from a cheesy 120gig 5400rpm Fujitsu in a laptop for
sure, but very second rate indeed when compared to an SSD for speed.

As Daniel says, it's all down to what you consider important and how
big your base dataset is. Being of a 'filer' disposition, I've got a
4Tb NAS that has most of the junk neatly arranged on it, so all my
machines could get by on 120gig SSDs or smaller without squeezing.
They actually have 240gig SSDs (Vertex 3) because I was quite flush
for a time!

And they absolutely *fly*, it's quite startling the difference you
get. Better than double the CPU speed or number of cores; better than
doubling the RAM; better than doubling the GPU tps. Which shouldn't be
a surprise - with a decent SATA3 SSD you're getting x4 or x5 what a
decent 3.5" HD will manage in raw speed, and far faster than that for
small files.

Booting up in 6 seconds is an amusing party trick, given that modern
OSes generally only need to be rebooted for patching, but the speed
that makes that happen continues for everything else you do too.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mr Death?" - e e cummings/Tom Baker