Lately there has been a choice to make between conventional hard drives and flash based Solid State Drives (SSD). The decision boiled down to speed vs. cost vs. capacity. SSDs can be blazingly fast, but they are expensive, and limited in capacity. To get a SSD in the 480 – 500GB capacity is a staggering $1,600 or thereabouts (by comparison, 1 TB hard drives are under $70, for double the capacity). So, people have been figuring out just how little space they can get away with for their machine’s main hard drive, in order to get an affordable SSD. Then there is a lingering suspicion about the reliability of the NAND Flash memory in SSDs, which have a limited number of times they can be written to before the cells degrade. These limits are in the millions of writes, and SSD manufacturers provide extra, unused space (over-provisioning) that can be used to substitute for unreliable cells.
A new development promises to let computer owners have their cake and eat it too. Hybrid SATA drive controllers can twin a smaller SSD with a large hard drive, to give the size and security of a hard drive, at 80% of the performance of a SSD drive. Incorporated by Highpoint on a PCI-e card, and on some new Intel motherboards from Asus and others, the controllers allow you to gain speed without breaking the bank.
HighPoint is not the first to introduce a hybrid SSD/HD RAID controller, but their card is an affordable upgrade to existing PCs, and you can use your choice of hard drive and SSD. HighPoint’s RocketHybrid product release PDF.
HighPoint RocketHybrid 122x Series Card
HighPoint’s RocketHybrid HBA’s combine the superior performance of an SSD, with the cost effective, high-capacity value of a SATA HDD, into a single storage device know as a Hybrid Drive. Hybrid Drives are optimized for high-performance computing, and deliver 80% of the SSD’s performance boost, with 100% of the HDD’s capacity. The Smart Hybrid Storage Solution provides the perfect blend of performance and capacity, without sacrificing affordability; satisfying the needs of gamers, digital image editors and their power-hungry application.
Intel Z68 Express Chipset
Intel’s Smart Response technology uses their BD82Z68 Platform Controller Hub on new Z68 motherboards to use a SSD of up to 64 GB as a cache for the hard drive, addressed as one volume. HotHardware article.
Like Seagate’s Momentus XT laptop drives (which contain a 4 GB SSD cache) it takes time for the cache to ‘learn’ which your most-frequently used files are, so it gets gradually faster as you use it. The other implication of this is that it won’t have much if any effect on newly written data, as it hasn’t had a chance to be cached yet.