On 01/27/2015 11:20 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
There are hybrid disk drives that have a "small" SSD flash memory along
with the regular spinning media, typically to serve as a cache for lower
latency. Does anyone have long term experience with these units? Most
flash memory is not designed for the long term repeated read/write/erase
cycles of a primary disk drive -- how are these holding up? Is the
flash configuration totally transparent to the Linux file systems and
formatting operations?
Yasha Karant
I have no experience with these drives but I personally don't see any
reason to use them. I would far rather buy regular HD and then install
more RAM in the system. Excess RAM gets automagically assigned to cache
by the kernel so even a relatively inexpensive RAM stick will give you a
much faster and much smarter cache than a hybrid drive.
Here's an example from a small LTSP system I run:
Mem: 16233776k total, 16036304k used, 197472k free, 748100k buffers
Swap: 16777212k total, 0k used, 16777212k free, 12283660k cached
Note that there is essentially no free RAM but about 12 GB of cache :)
Jeff
