Friday, November 04, 2011

Icy News: Hardware and Software Caching Explained

"With the price of platter based hard drives as low as they are (under normal conditions) and the price of solid state drives still relatively high, the concept of hybrid storage solutions; combining the low price of platter based storage with the speed of solid state drives, will become increasingly common. We are going to break down two different approaches for a hybrid storage setup; hardware-based and software-based implementations..." - via Storage Review

SR (Storage Review) has a nice article, going over some of the available software and hardware caching options. Some of the more common solutions to end users are the Momentus XT OCZ synapse and Intel RST. We talked about SSD caching being a trend in the upcoming years and so far, everything has come true. We think about this and say, 'would this be the best solution to the storage wall with either SSD or HDD?' We have to rethink about how a hard drive should look like, especially with SSD's. On SR's article, they mention two of the more intense solutions, which both use PCI express interfacing. This improves the connection and performance dramatically. 


Here at Icy Dock, we also have our solution to SSD caching, which is not to use it. At this time, the technology is still expensive and can be a hassle. Our MB882HX-1SB uses a RAID implementation to not cache, but to have two separate partitions (Hybrid and HDD). 


Check out our ICY TIP about this:


http://icydock.blogspot.com/2011/08/icy-tip-keep-your-cheap-low-capacity.html




So let us know what you think about this. This is interesting as the trend may keep going this way or perhaps go a different direction!

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