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Pemalite on 03 July 2016
Zkuq said:
Pemalite said:

Nope.

Nope what? Care to enlighten me? If I said something incorrect, I'd gladly be corrected and told why it's wrong. If I did happen to spread some misinformation, I'd like to make sure I won't do it again.

Nope as in the SSD will still not accellerate the retreival/writing of data for the SSHD.

Virtual Memory/Swap File, whatever you want to call it isn't designed to cache hard drives on the SSD and you should probably read up on what it really is used for.
In-fact you would wan't to avoid lots of small writes on an SSD for things like Virtual Memory/Caching. - Why? Wear and tear. SSD's have a finite amount of write cycles, it's wise to minimise your Virtual Memory, disable things like Superfetch.
There is a reason why the notoriously unreliable OCZ Vertex 2 in another machine of mine is still running as strongly as the day I bought it many years ago. (I was an early adopter, sue me.)

In short... There is still a benefit to owning an SSHD over a mechanical drive even if you have an SSD as the main.
I know this, because I have all 3 and have done extensive testing in memory management, the pinnicle of which being a Ram drive.

Ganoncrotch said:

I know you could set up a RAID 1 setup like you said combining say a 240gb SSD with 240gb of a normal HDD it would give you a very strange pairing of disks working together with the standard drive just being a backup of the SSD but at

http://ask.adaptec.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17037/~/q-%26-a%3A-hybrid-ssd%2Fhdd-raid

As for an hybrid SSHD for media, again... only so much can phsically fit on the Flash storage point of that type of drive which the drive will determine based on usage of those files, if you have 500gb of movies on an SSHD it isn't going to  put 10mb of the start of each file into that SSD portion of the drive because you will not have used any of the files before wanting to watch them, they just don't have that flexibility or awareness to know you are going to be sending requests to watch individual files at a point, they just work on file usage as the drive works inside the PC.


I would advise against RAID, unless you know what you are doing... It is a recipe for disaster.

A better stop gap would actually be an SSD Cache drive, like Sandisk's Express Cache.

As for SSHD's. You are half right, there is only so much you can fit on the flash, it will not be trying to cache movies and the such, only data which is heavy in random reads/writes which the controller will recognize automatically, which is a strength of NAND and a con for Mechanical, which is why it works so damn well.
If you are running games, there is a benefit to it as there is allot of random reads/writes.
If you are only streaming media... Well. Best you use an external hard drive for that, for portability's sake.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

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Zkuq on 03 July 2016
Ganoncrotch said:
Zkuq said:

Nope what? Care to enlighten me? If I said something incorrect, I'd gladly be corrected and told why it's wrong. If I did happen to spread some misinformation, I'd like to make sure I won't do it again.

I know you could set up a RAID 1 setup like you said combining say a 240gb SSD with 240gb of a normal HDD it would give you a very strange pairing of disks working together with the standard drive just being a backup of the SSD but at

http://ask.adaptec.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17037/~/q-%26-a%3A-hybrid-ssd%2Fhdd-raid

They go into creating a RAID 10 setup with double those disks with the aim to get double the performance of an SSD mirrored onto a normal HDD space... that said you can't really use raid 0 over a mechanical HDD and an SSD, well... you might be able to, but it really isn't going to work I think as at the end of the day any files stored on the mechanical parts of the drive are still going to be effected by the spin up time and disk head speed to find the files on the drive phsically even if there is an SSD storing some portions of the files.

It's interesting to mess with different raid setups but in reality anything using raid 0 between SSD and HDD is going to be a strange combo.

That said, as for the SSD for OS/Programs and Mechanical HDD for media not making the media seeking work faster as permalite said, that isn't entirely true, While obviously seeking out the start of the Avi file to play on the mechanical HDD will still take the same lenght of time, having the media playing program on the SSD will allow windows to get that open and ready to receive the file far faster with a OS SSD than without. So while in a perfect world SSD's everywhere would be great for a standard user SSD's on the primary drive will do wonders for opening programs to assist a mechanical media drive.

As for an hybrid SSHD for media, again... only so much can phsically fit on the Flash storage point of that type of drive which the drive will determine based on usage of those files, if you have 500gb of movies on an SSHD it isn't going to  put 10mb of the start of each file into that SSD portion of the drive because you will not have used any of the files before wanting to watch them, they just don't have that flexibility or awareness to know you are going to be sending requests to watch individual files at a point, they just work on file usage as the drive works inside the PC.

 

amg... wall of text, for a noob user avoid RAIDs lol, I don't mean to use the term noob here in a bad way towards anyone, I more am substituting what I would normally say as beginner user with the term used byt the OP, don't mean to offend!

I wasn't talking about RAID 0, 1, or 10. The correct term appears to be SSD caching, which as far as I've understood things, is equivalent to what SSHDs are doing. Essentially, a smaller SSD is used as a cache for a larger HDD. And to clarify things further, I wasn't talking about SSD-level performance either, because I'm sure SSD caching and SSHDs don't have quite that performance (although they should get closer to it than regular HDDs).

Anyway, being a RAID noob, this was a good incentive to read up on RAID a bit. It never seems to be useful for home use (at least for me), so every time I read about it, I tend to forget it. :p



Zkuq on 03 July 2016
Pemalite said:
Zkuq said:

Nope what? Care to enlighten me? If I said something incorrect, I'd gladly be corrected and told why it's wrong. If I did happen to spread some misinformation, I'd like to make sure I won't do it again.

Nope as in the SSD will still not accellerate the retreival/writing of data for the SSHD.

Virtual Memory/Swap File, whatever you want to call it isn't designed to cache hard drives on the SSD and you should probably read up on what it really is used for.
In-fact you would wan't to avoid lots of small writes on an SSD for things like Virtual Memory/Caching. - Why? Wear and tear. SSD's have a finite amount of write cycles, it's wise to minimise your Virtual Memory, disable things like Superfetch.
There is a reason why the notoriously unreliable OCZ Vertex 2 in another machine of mine is still running as strongly as the day I bought it many years ago. (I was an early adopter, sue me.)

In short... There is still a benefit to owning an SSHD over a mechanical drive even if you have an SSD as the main.
I know this, because I have all 3 and have done extensive testing in memory management, the pinnicle of which being a Ram drive.

I think I really failed to explain myself the first time because I got two people trying to correct me, and I don't think either of you understood my original point. :P Yeah, I meant SSD caching (despite talking about swapping because I'm bad with storage-related terms) and how I believe it should be equivalent to owning an SSHD. That is, to me it would seem that using SSD caching (SSD for cache + HDD for actual storage) should be roughly equal to having an SSHD performance-wise.

I do realize SSD caching is going to be stressful for the SSD, but doesn't the SSD component of an SSHD face the same problem?



S.T.A.G.E. on 03 July 2016
danielrdp said:
S.T.A.G.E. said:
Let me guess. Did Microsoft make the push that much easier? Haha

Yeap, they did indeed. 

Im with you, but i dont have my PC just yet, so I will stick with my Xbox One until then because of the library of free games that ive amassed.



Pemalite on 04 July 2016
Zkuq said:
Pemalite said:

Nope as in the SSD will still not accellerate the retreival/writing of data for the SSHD.

Virtual Memory/Swap File, whatever you want to call it isn't designed to cache hard drives on the SSD and you should probably read up on what it really is used for.
In-fact you would wan't to avoid lots of small writes on an SSD for things like Virtual Memory/Caching. - Why? Wear and tear. SSD's have a finite amount of write cycles, it's wise to minimise your Virtual Memory, disable things like Superfetch.
There is a reason why the notoriously unreliable OCZ Vertex 2 in another machine of mine is still running as strongly as the day I bought it many years ago. (I was an early adopter, sue me.)

In short... There is still a benefit to owning an SSHD over a mechanical drive even if you have an SSD as the main.
I know this, because I have all 3 and have done extensive testing in memory management, the pinnicle of which being a Ram drive.

I think I really failed to explain myself the first time because I got two people trying to correct me, and I don't think either of you understood my original point. :P Yeah, I meant SSD caching (despite talking about swapping because I'm bad with storage-related terms) and how I believe it should be equivalent to owning an SSHD. That is, to me it would seem that using SSD caching (SSD for cache + HDD for actual storage) should be roughly equal to having an SSHD performance-wise.

I do realize SSD caching is going to be stressful for the SSD, but doesn't the SSD component of an SSHD face the same problem?

They use different NAND and wear levelling mechanisms, so it's not Apple to Apples.
The controller tries to avoid writes as much as possible, so once it's worked out what stuff you use most frequently, it will be cached and minimal farther writes made.

As for SSD Cache drives, it's actually a better experience than an SSHD, I have a Sandisk Express Cache in another machine, the main advantage is the size of the SSD, which means more is aggressively cached. And boy can you tell the difference if the SSD cache is turned off. The NAND is also higher grade, faster.
And because the drives are fairly large, it can do better wear levelling to prolong life.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

Around the Network
Ganoncrotch on 04 July 2016
Zkuq said:
Ganoncrotch said:

I know you could set up a RAID 1 setup like you said combining say a 240gb SSD with 240gb of a normal HDD it would give you a very strange pairing of disks working together with the standard drive just being a backup of the SSD but at

http://ask.adaptec.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17037/~/q-%26-a%3A-hybrid-ssd%2Fhdd-raid

They go into creating a RAID 10 setup with double those disks with the aim to get double the performance of an SSD mirrored onto a normal HDD space... that said you can't really use raid 0 over a mechanical HDD and an SSD, well... you might be able to, but it really isn't going to work I think as at the end of the day any files stored on the mechanical parts of the drive are still going to be effected by the spin up time and disk head speed to find the files on the drive phsically even if there is an SSD storing some portions of the files.

It's interesting to mess with different raid setups but in reality anything using raid 0 between SSD and HDD is going to be a strange combo.

That said, as for the SSD for OS/Programs and Mechanical HDD for media not making the media seeking work faster as permalite said, that isn't entirely true, While obviously seeking out the start of the Avi file to play on the mechanical HDD will still take the same lenght of time, having the media playing program on the SSD will allow windows to get that open and ready to receive the file far faster with a OS SSD than without. So while in a perfect world SSD's everywhere would be great for a standard user SSD's on the primary drive will do wonders for opening programs to assist a mechanical media drive.

As for an hybrid SSHD for media, again... only so much can phsically fit on the Flash storage point of that type of drive which the drive will determine based on usage of those files, if you have 500gb of movies on an SSHD it isn't going to  put 10mb of the start of each file into that SSD portion of the drive because you will not have used any of the files before wanting to watch them, they just don't have that flexibility or awareness to know you are going to be sending requests to watch individual files at a point, they just work on file usage as the drive works inside the PC.

 

amg... wall of text, for a noob user avoid RAIDs lol, I don't mean to use the term noob here in a bad way towards anyone, I more am substituting what I would normally say as beginner user with the term used byt the OP, don't mean to offend!

I wasn't talking about RAID 0, 1, or 10. The correct term appears to be SSD caching, which as far as I've understood things, is equivalent to what SSHDs are doing. Essentially, a smaller SSD is used as a cache for a larger HDD. And to clarify things further, I wasn't talking about SSD-level performance either, because I'm sure SSD caching and SSHDs don't have quite that performance (although they should get closer to it than regular HDDs).

Anyway, being a RAID noob, this was a good incentive to read up on RAID a bit. It never seems to be useful for home use (at least for me), so every time I read about it, I tend to forget it. :p

If you don't know anything about them RAID 5 is a very good way to make sure you never lose any information and it only comes at the cost of one harddrive , you can have it starting from 3 drives so if you have 3 1tb drives you end up with 2 terabytes of basically perfectly minded storage, if any one of the 3 drives dies you can just replace it and rebuild all your data, but you can expand raid 5 to include more drives and you'll always just be losing 1 drive worth of space.

It doesn't add anything performance wise for the drives though, but even for at home in pc use it comes at a small cost and gives you great data protection.



Why not check me out on youtube and help me on the way to 2k subs over at www.youtube.com/stormcloudlive

Zkuq on 04 July 2016
Pemalite said:
Zkuq said:

I think I really failed to explain myself the first time because I got two people trying to correct me, and I don't think either of you understood my original point. :P Yeah, I meant SSD caching (despite talking about swapping because I'm bad with storage-related terms) and how I believe it should be equivalent to owning an SSHD. That is, to me it would seem that using SSD caching (SSD for cache + HDD for actual storage) should be roughly equal to having an SSHD performance-wise.

I do realize SSD caching is going to be stressful for the SSD, but doesn't the SSD component of an SSHD face the same problem?

They use different NAND and wear levelling mechanisms, so it's not Apple to Apples.
The controller tries to avoid writes as much as possible, so once it's worked out what stuff you use most frequently, it will be cached and minimal farther writes made.

As for SSD Cache drives, it's actually a better experience than an SSHD, I have a Sandisk Express Cache in another machine, the main advantage is the size of the SSD, which means more is aggressively cached. And boy can you tell the difference if the SSD cache is turned off. The NAND is also higher grade, faster.
And because the drives are fairly large, it can do better wear levelling to prolong life.

Ah, excellent points. Thanks!

Ganoncrotch said:
Zkuq said:

I wasn't talking about RAID 0, 1, or 10. The correct term appears to be SSD caching, which as far as I've understood things, is equivalent to what SSHDs are doing. Essentially, a smaller SSD is used as a cache for a larger HDD. And to clarify things further, I wasn't talking about SSD-level performance either, because I'm sure SSD caching and SSHDs don't have quite that performance (although they should get closer to it than regular HDDs).

Anyway, being a RAID noob, this was a good incentive to read up on RAID a bit. It never seems to be useful for home use (at least for me), so every time I read about it, I tend to forget it. :p

If you don't know anything about them RAID 5 is a very good way to make sure you never lose any information and it only comes at the cost of one harddrive , you can have it starting from 3 drives so if you have 3 1tb drives you end up with 2 terabytes of basically perfectly minded storage, if any one of the 3 drives dies you can just replace it and rebuild all your data, but you can expand raid 5 to include more drives and you'll always just be losing 1 drive worth of space.

It doesn't add anything performance wise for the drives though, but even for at home in pc use it comes at a small cost and gives you great data protection.

That sounds pretty good for protecting against data loss in hardware failure situations. I use an external HDD for all my valuable/storable data though (e.g. music, documents), so I'm not sure how RAID would work with that. I also imagine it's a lot less stressful for the disk if it's there for storage purposes only without need for constant reading and writing, so I would think it's going to last way longer than an internal disk. Also, these days if I want a backup solution, it had better protect me against randomware as well, and RAID doesn't do that, does it?



Ganoncrotch on 04 July 2016
Zkuq said:
Pemalite said:

They use different NAND and wear levelling mechanisms, so it's not Apple to Apples.
The controller tries to avoid writes as much as possible, so once it's worked out what stuff you use most frequently, it will be cached and minimal farther writes made.

As for SSD Cache drives, it's actually a better experience than an SSHD, I have a Sandisk Express Cache in another machine, the main advantage is the size of the SSD, which means more is aggressively cached. And boy can you tell the difference if the SSD cache is turned off. The NAND is also higher grade, faster.
And because the drives are fairly large, it can do better wear levelling to prolong life.

Ah, excellent points. Thanks!

Ganoncrotch said:

If you don't know anything about them RAID 5 is a very good way to make sure you never lose any information and it only comes at the cost of one harddrive , you can have it starting from 3 drives so if you have 3 1tb drives you end up with 2 terabytes of basically perfectly minded storage, if any one of the 3 drives dies you can just replace it and rebuild all your data, but you can expand raid 5 to include more drives and you'll always just be losing 1 drive worth of space.

It doesn't add anything performance wise for the drives though, but even for at home in pc use it comes at a small cost and gives you great data protection.

That sounds pretty good for protecting against data loss in hardware failure situations. I use an external HDD for all my valuable/storable data though (e.g. music, documents), so I'm not sure how RAID would work with that. I also imagine it's a lot less stressful for the disk if it's there for storage purposes only without need for constant reading and writing, so I would think it's going to last way longer than an internal disk. Also, these days if I want a backup solution, it had better protect me against randomware as well, and RAID doesn't do that, does it?

If you mean ransomware then no, if you have any drives on an effected pc, even if they are network mapped drives then some of the fuckers like kryptolocker and such will absolutely mangle all of your files. A raid offers zero protection from these it's basically just a harddrive to the PC and everything that allows can happen the only thing it does is in a raid 5 scenario it basically spreads the data over the 3 drives in a way that one of the 3 drives contains just a marker which can be used to restore the other drives info if lost, so over all 3 drives if you pull one drive out the information is all technically still there so one drive can physically die and you lose zero files

As for a removable drive getting less wear and tear it's true if you don't use that drive it will be saved from some of that, but at the same time if it's out in the open it has a chance to get effected by other things like just being knocked off a ledge or vibrations on a desk which will take a toll on the hardware too. at the end of the day, the only way you can save your data absolutely is to back it up somehow on 2 devices, then if one fails, make a new backup.



Why not check me out on youtube and help me on the way to 2k subs over at www.youtube.com/stormcloudlive

NobleTeam360 on 04 July 2016

Tagging for future reference.



Zkuq on 04 July 2016
Ganoncrotch said:
Zkuq said:

Ah, excellent points. Thanks!

That sounds pretty good for protecting against data loss in hardware failure situations. I use an external HDD for all my valuable/storable data though (e.g. music, documents), so I'm not sure how RAID would work with that. I also imagine it's a lot less stressful for the disk if it's there for storage purposes only without need for constant reading and writing, so I would think it's going to last way longer than an internal disk. Also, these days if I want a backup solution, it had better protect me against randomware as well, and RAID doesn't do that, does it?

If you mean ransomware [1] then no, if you have any drives on an effected pc, even if they are network mapped drives then some of the fuckers like kryptolocker and such will absolutely mangle all of your files. A raid offers zero protection from these it's basically just a harddrive to the PC and everything that allows can happen the only thing it does is in a raid 5 scenario it basically spreads the data over the 3 drives in a way that one of the 3 drives contains just a marker which can be used to restore the other drives info if lost, so over all 3 drives if you pull one drive out the information is all technically still there so one drive can physically die and you lose zero files

As for a removable drive getting less wear and tear it's true if you don't use that drive it will be saved from some of that, but at the same time if it's out in the open it has a chance to get effected by other things like just being knocked off a ledge or vibrations on a desk which will take a toll on the hardware too. [2] at the end of the day, the only way you can save your data absolutely is to back it up somehow on 2 devices, then if one fails, make a new backup. [3]

[1] Of all the typos I could make, I just had to make the one that still sounds like a word... Yes, I meant ransomware (I wrote 'randomware' first this time too). And sounds like what I thought, thanks for confirmation!

[2] Luckily mine is on the floor, under some wires next to the wall so I can't accidentally step on it.

[3] I know. That's why I'm a bit lazy with that. Manual backups are no fun, and it still requires another device. I have one, but it's capacity is smaller than the one's I have now and it requires external power. Cloud backups are always another option too, but it costs money, and I'm pretty sure that to back up a 2 TB drive, it's going to be a lot of money. I'm sure once I'm done with my studies and get a job, I'll also get some backup storage but until then, I'm just hoping I have enough luck. At least I don't have anything super important so losing everything shouldn't be catastrophic.