Computex 2011: OCZ's RevoDrive Hybrid, HDD & SSD on PCIe Card
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 31, 2011 10:16 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- SSDs
- SandForce
- RevoDrive
- SF-2000
- Computex 2011
OCZ is feeling quite experimental these days as it has announced a hybrid RevoDrive. Take the new RevoDrive 3 and use it as a cache in front of a 2.5" HDD (either 500GB or 1TB capacity) and you've got the RevoDrive Hybrid.
I'm not particularly interesting in the PCIe version of this but I do see some potential if OCZ were able to cram all of this into a standard SATA form factor. With the advent of Intel SRT however, I believe the time for hybrid SSD/HDD solutions may be limited. With Ivy Bridge next year nearly all new PCs will support SSD caching.
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Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
Looks like hybrid is the word of 2011. I wonder why there haven't been more of these kind of solutions as Momentus XT has been the only one so far. Intel SRT helps though, no need to buy a specific drive anymore.DanNeely - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
The Momentus XT's performance gains were fairly limited and the price premium relatively high. More hybrids are a good thing, but as long as the SSD part is hobbled by very few flash chips bottlenecking the controller the end results are going to be underwhelming; meanwhile more flash drives the cost up even higher.GullLars - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
The intended usage for Momentus XT were not where it saw the most usage.A more optimal usage of NAND on a HDD would be on a 3,5" drive, and use a hybrid controller to controll both NAND and HDD, using LBA and having a 10% portion of the harddrive set aside as a butter for a similar method of random write speedup as we see in SSDs. Using the NAND as read-only cache and with a slow intake and eviction rate would allow a couple of cheap ONFI 2 Synchronous MLC dies/chips to work great, and with abstraction for writes give sustained random writes of >20K IOPS for 10% of the drive's capacity (~100 gigabytes), which could be moved during idle time to clear the 10% buffer.
Just my thoughts.
Denithor - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
Seems like this would be a lot of weight attached to a somewhat flimsy pcie card. Not sure I'd trust it.A5 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
Your GPU cooler is way heavier than a 2.5" HDDhechacker1 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
Neat, but I would like to see one more like a traditional RAID card with a SATA cable connection so that I can connect any 2.5/3.5 hard drive.Limiting it to a slower laptop drive doesn't seem wise. But I guess if the caching is done right, the slow HDD shouldn't matter much.
Olternaut - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
Do I need to wait till next year for Ivy Bridge or can a Sandy Bridge cpu in conjunction with a Z68 board support SRT?I'm looking to build a rig with this board: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/05/27/g...
There is a 20 GB built in SSD to be used as cache for another drive like a regular HD. I'm thinking of using the RevoDrive 3 to boot win7 and have a 1TB HD as storage using the 20GB onboard SSD as a cache.
Opinions?
Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
That board is going to cost monster monies. $$ bigtime. Maybe even more than $250? It is a lot to pay for less performance than a typical SSD+ HDD two drive solution.Dylock - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
I've read articles on the Z68, and how it just caches recent information for faster reads. You can clear the Z68 cache by doing reads on other files, reducing the system performance once again once the 'old' information is flushed out for the new 'nonsense' information.I don't understand why companies don't configure the cache to do the following:
-Have the SSD be file-system aware OR the OS be SSD cache aware
-Store the first part of a file only, or in other words, the part of the file that the computer is waiting for from the hard drive. By the time the hard drive catches up, the first part of the file has already been processed. Effect = reduced latency for all hard drive activity (if the cache is large enough).
This could be adjustable for low/high IOPS systems, most frequently accessed files, larger use of cache of files that are called upon conjuctively, etc.
It would then become an 'intelligent' array, capable of giving performance on data that the customer uses the most. However, it would be hard to benchmark until it 'learns' which data should be cached in which way.
alcalde - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link
"With Ivy Bridge next year nearly all new PCs will support SSD caching."Um, what about the entire AMD lineup? :-) Intel's solutions are also software-based, and thus limited in what OS(es) are supported. For the rest of us, there are solutions like this. Linux also has two projects, bcache and fs-cache, to use an SSD as a cache for hard drive(s).