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back to article OCZ flashes its cache at hard drives

Hard disk drives are getting a caching flash wrapper if OCZ has its way. Watch out for this SSD supplier's Synapse caching flasher. Not content with the RevoDrive Hybrid, a PCIe card containing a flash memory store and DataPlex software to manage the on-card hard drive, OCZ has revved its cocktail of components and crafted a …

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  1. Piro Silver badge

    SandForce controllers have a good rep?

    I don't think so. Common wisdom recently seems to be to avoid all new Sandforce drives, as they have had many problems with dropping out of the BIOS, data loss, and random denial by not only OCZ, but surprisingly Corsair, a normally great company for customer service.

    Personally I think new Sandforce drives are a little risky at the moment.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Linux drivers?

    Interesting. Yet again from OCZ however only Windows is noted as a supported OS.

    DIsappointing to say the least, especially considering there are very few caching SSD solutions for the *nix market, other than the extremely expensive Fusion-IO products.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RAID support?

    But can you shove drives with these on board into a RAID stripe?

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  4. a_mu

    cache

    Quick thought,

    is the idea of a cache file not part of the OS.

    it uses it to move data out of memory when memory is 'full'.

    so set the ssd as the cache drive, the spinning drive as the other drive, and don't you automaticaly get a ssd cache ?

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    1. Arnold Lieberman
      Reply Icon

      Nope

      You're thinking of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory.

      Similar concept, but different application.

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  5. Chris Mellor 1

    Prices

    The 64GB Synapse Cache costs $149 and the 128GB one $249; lower than we thought.

    Chris.

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  6. ElNumbre
    Boffin

    Bin Waitin...

    I've been waiting for something like this for a while, but lack of non-win os support really puts me off.

    However, I wonder if this could be used with iscsi to provide network based OS booting whilst reducing the need to be concerned about network speed.

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  7. Alan Brown Silver badge
    Devil

    @zef & EINumbre

    On *nixen you don't need proprietary software - just use ZFS, which has done this kind of thing for years.

    The fast write IOPS is to allow quick commit to disk, then leisurely spooling to the spinning rust as other io activity allows (writes tend ot be synchronous, reads async)

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  8. Infernoz Bronze badge
    FAIL

    Flash disks are still too unstable and expensive

    Some flash is as bad or even worse than the DeskStar drive family because if they fail, you lose everything, potentially even all the drives with the same firmware. I won't use any drive family which can fail this badly, even in a ZFS RAID 5 array.

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