[gadgetman496]

Anyone have more Info on this?

I'm looking at buying the Crucial M4 SSD and just spotted this on their site.

COMING SOON! Crucial Adrenaline Solid State Cache Solution.

Get the best of both worlds: SSD-like performance and the existing capacity of your hard drive. The Crucial Adrenaline solution places, or "caches", your most frequently needed files to a Crucial SSD while storing your less frequently used files on the system hard drive. LINK

I'm assuming it's going to take any secondary HDD storage and keep less used files on that rather than the SSD itself? Will there be a need for a particular Mobo feature to work in conjunction with this or is it going to be totally controlled by the drive\firmware itself?

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[gadgetman496]

Ah!, I just found this on their site.

* Combines a cost-effective, high-performance SSD with an existing hard drive to enable the best of both worlds: SSD-like performance with the high storage capacity of a hard drive.
* Comprises a 50GB Crucial® m4 SSD, a 3.5" adapter bracket, and caching software.
* Simple, two-step installation includes connecting the SSD to the motherboard with a standard SATA cable followed by installation of the software. LINK:

[vibe666]

it's been done before afaik, it's just a hybrid of a standard 3.5" drive with an SSD built into the chassis of the drive to keep the form factor the same and some fancy firmware to cache the most used files on the SSD portion of the drive.

it will work fine and will definitely be faster than a regular spindle only disk, but it's never going to give you the performance of a current gen SSD will on it's own.

the other thing is, much like a washer/dryer or printer/scanner combo, if one part of it fails, you lose the other as well.

if there was a lot of money to be saved then it might be worth a go, but i doubt that you'd save enough for it to be worthwhile, especially with the hiher than normal price of spindle based drives and the rapidly falling price of flash based ones.

EDIT: ah, right. slightly different than the yoke i was thinking of. could actually be interesting if it's reasonably flexible in how it lets you configure it.

[vibe666]

it's actually being done quite a bit in enterprise storage now as well and i believe some SAS controllers allow for one or more SSD's to be used as cache drives on large storage arrays to increase I/O on frequently used data.

[gadgetman496]

Originally Posted by vibe666

the other thing is, much like a washer/dryer or printer/scanner combo, if one part of it fails, you lose the other as well.

Sounds a bit like the current RAID 0 (Stripe)

Is it correct to say that SSD's even when they might fail due to reaching maximum writes (Highly unlikely I know but...) they still remain readable in order to get your data off them? as opposed to the mechanical drive crash were everything is pretty much gone.

Originally Posted by vibe666

it's actually being done quite a bit in enterprise storage now as well and i believe some SAS controllers allow for one or more SSD's to be used as cache drives on large storage arrays to increase I/O on frequently used data.

Would you think that the Crucial 128GB M4 is still one of the better SSD's out there & still a good buy?

[vibe666]

Originally Posted by gadgetman496

Sounds a bit like the current RAID 0 (Stripe)

yup, but with the main difference being that you wouldn't put anything you couldn't afford to lose on a RAID0 stripe and speed is more important than reliability.

i'd hope that however this new system works, that if you lose one of the drives, you don't automatically lose whatever is on the other one.

Originally Posted by gadgetman496

Is it correct to say that SSD's even when they might fail due to reaching maximum writes (Highly unlikely I know but...) they still remain readable in order to get your data off them? as opposed to the mechanical drive crash were everything is pretty much gone.

honestly, i don't know but you'd hope so.

Originally Posted by gadgetman496

Would you think that the Crucial 128GB M4 is still one of the better SSD's out there & still a good buy?

again i can't say for sure, but i do feel like the SSD playing field has been levelled a lot since sandforce fixed their recent controller problems. lots of the OCZ, corsair etc. drives using those controllers were plagued with reliability issues that ruined their reputations for being amongst the fastest drives out there allowing intel and other non-sandforce based drives to walk all over them on reliability alone, but now that that debacle is over, things are looking a lot different now, which i have no doubt will be better for everyone.

[Tea_Bag]

the M4 and the Samsung 830 series are the best SSD's on the market at the moment.

there really is no reason to use an SSD as a cache unless its like 30gb or something.
if you have a Z68 chipset board you can use Intel 's SRT cache, which is the same thing.

[gadgetman496]

Originally Posted by Tea_Bag

the M4 and the Samsung 830 series are the best SSD's on the market at the moment.

there really is no reason to use an SSD as a cache unless its like 30gb or something.
if you have a Z68 chipset board you can use Intel 's SRT cache, which is the same thing.

Actually you are correct when you mention SRT cache (Smart Response Technology) on the Z68 boards, I forgot about that

I was thinking of getting the MSI Z68A-GD65 (G3) along with the Crucial M4 which leads me to another question. That board has 4 6Gb/s (White SATA connectors), 2 of them have the Intel controller and 2 have the Marvell controller. Would it matter which of these is used for the Crucial M4? Would one have any advantage\disadvantage over the other?


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