On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 04:51:42PM +1100, Trent W. Buck wrote:
it does. it's called ReadyBoost.
That sounds like the one they introduced back when USB keys were cool.
yeah, it was originally intended to be used with very fast (for the time) USB flash disks. there was even a short-lived product category of 4 and 8GB "Ready Boost capable" flash disks...many designed to plug straight into a motherboard USB jumper block rather than an external USB port (or into both via a tiny jumper block -> USB port adaptor)
I don't think anyone seriously intends it for hybrid SSD/HDD usage.
yeah. that could be because if you search the windows forums, all you see is morons talking about how it's some kind of virtual memory thingy. they obviously don't have a clue what they're talking about, but the mythology that ReadyBoost is some kind of super-fancy virtual memory is pervasive. multiple layers of caching (SSD and RAM) is obviously too difficult a concept for the average windows users to grasp....but there's no reason why RB on a fast SSD couldn't provide the same kind of read benefits that L2ARC provides for ZFS.
It looks like the drive has to NTFS/exFAT/FAT formatted, because ReadyBoost caches to a file, not a disk/partition.
the option was greyed out whether i tried to give it a formatted or unformatted partition.
See above re 32GB cap.
as you said, it uses a file on an NTFS or exFAT (works on FAT too but is limited by FAT's 4GB filesize limit) partition, so the size of the partition doesn't matter, only the size of the RB file. i also tried it with a 20GB partition so if they partition size was relevant, that should have worked.
(Aside: the windows types I've asked about this indicate that they actually use the hardware vendor's hybrid drive implementation, e.g. Intel's.)
yeah. i just *love* vendor-specific software. i'm really keen to tie myself to specific cpu and/or disk vendor brands. i don't have any intel machines or motherboards. every time i think i should get one of the nice new intel cpus, i'm put off by the fact that the M/B + CPU cost almost double what a roughly equivalent AMD system would cost and for anything faster you're paying a lot more again. worse, they have half the SATA ports and PCI-e lanes (admittedly they're pci-e 3.0 rather than pci-e 2.0, but i have exactly one PCI-e card that can make use of 3.0, and it really makes little practical difference in real life whether it's in a 2.0 slot or 3.0. recentish AMD m/bs like the Asus Sabertooth 990FX rev. 2 support PCI-e 3.0, but they're won't be an AMD CPU supports it until Zen is released late this year). the number of sata ports is important to me because i currently have 10 sata 3 drives installed in my main combined workstation/server box and spare hot-swap bays for 4 more for future expansion/upgrades (being able to replace the drives in my zfs pools without having to remove the old ones first is useful). some of those drives are on an LSI SAS2008 8-port SAS card.
I know at least one guy who netboots his Windows games machine off a linux array, exported as iSCSI or something. I dunno where the bottleneck is there, but it means he can snapshot the disk &c like it was a VM.
i thought about doing similar using iscsi exports from my zfs pool. decided not to bother because it's hard to see how a 1Gbps network disk can be remotely close in performace to a local 6Gbps SATA SSD (good SATA SSDs get up to 550MB/s read and 400+ write). M.2 / PCI-e SSDs can be (and are) a LOT faster than that. 1Gbps isn't too bad compare to a mechanical hard disk.
$ msy | foldr grep -Fi -- 2tb 3.5 sata3 7200
BTW did i ever give you a copy of my msygrep script? it does what you 'msy | foldr grep ...' does and a bunch more stuff (including grep -v style AND min/max price exclusions, and the ability to fetch the latest parts list. also to optionally search through archived price lists for price comparisons over time). http://taz.net.au/~cas/msytools/ i remember talking about it with you some time ago...and my fetch-MSY.sh script has a copy of your code to strip MS Word crap from the text file. NOTE to anyone who dowloads these scripts, remember to change the MSYDIR variable NEAR the start of the script to something valid, like "~/MSY" or "~/dl/MSY" e.g. even with the exchange rate going to crap, the ST4000DX001 has gone down $23 since it first appeared on MSY's price list in May 2014. $ msygrep -a ST4000DX001 | uniq -f1 2014-05-01 242 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 7200rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD 2014-11-01 239 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 7200rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD 2014-12-18 233 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 7200rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD 2015-01-10 225 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 7200rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD 2015-02-16 235 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 7200rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD 2015-04-18 229 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 7200rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD 2015-06-25 228 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 7200rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD 2015-08-21 228 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD 2015-12-03 225 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD 2015-12-29 219 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD Current 219 Seagate 3.5" SSHD 4TB ST4000DX001 NAND 8GB SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Hybrid HDD The ST4000VN000 has dropped $40 from 259 to 219 since Aug 2013, but only $10 since May 2014 when the 4TB SSHD appeared. $ msygrep -a ST4000VN000 -v Enterprise | uniq -f1 2013-08-27 259 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2013-09-05 242 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2013-09-11 241 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2013-12-02 230 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2014-02-15 239 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2014-05-01 229 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2014-07-06 227 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2014-11-01 215 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2014-11-21 214 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2015-03-03 225 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2015-04-24 228 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2015-05-13 225 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2015-08-21 224 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2015-12-03 223 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD 2015-12-29 219 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD Current 219 Seagate 3.5" NAS 4TB ST4000VN000 SATA3 5900rpm 64MB Cache HDD interestingly, hard disk prices have hardly moved much in years....while SSD prices are dropping rapidly (and sizes and speeds are also improving).
That's a ~20% markup on the first two. SSDs start at A$60 for 120GB -- not much more than the difference.
mine are Seagate ST4000DX001. same price as the ST4000VN000 NAS model...which is what i'd use in a RAID or ZFS or btrfs array because they don't have firmware that's crippled for use in "NAS" type setups (specifically long timeouts and retries on errors....reasonable for dekstop usage but tends to get drives booted out of raid etc arrays because it seems like a failing disk). Either that WD Red WD40EFRX or the Hitachi HGST 0S03666
What's the failure mode when the NAND wears out? Does it detect that and fall back to being a regular HDD?
no idea and i hope so. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>