ahh that is indeed neat.
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I wish that the ssd part of the drive was separate from the HDD portion. would love to be able to throw /boot and swap onto the SSD portion and leave everything else on the HDD portion
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Thats an interesting solution!But now SSDs r so much more affordable that theres not much reason to not get the size u need.
Have u had any experience with it?
Nice, Iāve heard bad things about Storage Spaces stability though. (although, I am running btrfs, so who am I to judge)
BlockquoteThats what concerned me a bit,the slowdown on larger filesā¦Thats limited to the size of the flash,yes?
Iām a bit surprised they havent developed this further.
Well, I wouldnāt be, I had a 32GB Sandisk ReadyCache and it was pretty awful, the problem with caching is that its not smart or user configurable, so for most heavy users who would care, their data would be flushed from cache in no time. How many times can one load the same game level for instance, only very light productivity users might benefit if their needs stay within the cache. Increasing the size of the cache eventually hits the point where you may as well just buy an SSD.
I know certain macās were configured to use SSD as cache and the operating system would intelligently manage its use, things like writes would be cached to the ssd before moving them to the harddrive etc, Something beyond what a transparent hardware solution like an hybrid drive could manage.
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Again, donāt expect SSD throughput on SUSTAINED reads or writes. But sustained read/write is a fairly uncommon desktop workload unless youāre doing stuff like video editing.
Sustained throughput might be 100 megabytes per sec.
However where SSDs generally kill HDs that actually matters for a regular desktop is in random access.
This is what the cache helps with, small random accesses to frequently used files.
Iām not sure if the latter generation hybrid drives do write caching, but if they do that would be a big win as well. Flash cache can in theory be used to serialize random writes, or at the very least buffer them so that the hard drive can catch up and the OS can carry on as if the write completed (because it actually did - to flash).
Readyboost isnāt quite the same. Readyboost is (if i recall) something like swap file caching. So if youāre not running out of RAM, it makes very little difference.
Readyboost definitely is not the same thing as intelligent read/write caching on a spinning disk.
Your not getting a response from him anytime soon
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I have a Western digital 4tb SSHD and I love it. A common misconception seems to be Seagate is the only one who makes them, which is wrong. They just make the cheapest ones which are also super prone to failure.
Iāve owned a few and I donāt recommend them. My first one had to be returned after several Crystal Disc failure reports. When I got my first S.M.A.R.T. failure I returned the drive. Ever the optimist I purchased two more. Both presented issues. Then I tried putting them in RAID 1. This only made things worse. They definitely not to be used in RAID arrays. Here is the reality (in my opinion, of course) : If youāre looking for storage drives (and strictly storage drives of a mechanical type) purchase the very expensive enterprise quality drives or purchase the more rugged (and considerably slower) NAS drives. Better yet, use these for cold storage. That a 1TB SSD can be purchased for less than $200.oo should give us a clue as to what to use for operating systems. A cheap klunk drive will always be risky business so if your data is worth a lot to you pay the piper and avoid hybrids.
2023 Amendment
Times have changed. For those who are still interested in using mechanical drives prices have really gotten reasonable. I now recommend getting CMR drives because they are affordable and tend to be more stable than SMR drives. I still donāt recommend hybrid mechanical drives because only 2 out of 5 of mine are still running. IMO they are just not worth the trouble.