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Zkuq on 04 July 2016
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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?