Instead of caching software, why not make a hybrid setup?

[Mradr]

Regarding this video and a few more following that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBFoz_xx ... ature=plcp

They were talking about how SSD should be used as a caching or used as a tier. They make some good points all around on both sides. They bring up cost and performance and how easy will this be setup base off how much control is needed from the user and applcation.

viewtopic.php?f=26&t=1215 Page 1
One of the points we made before was that SSD at one point will be cheap enough that having an SSD as cache would be pointless as the HDD could be totally replaced by the SSD. This bring up that SSD maybe shouldn't be used as caching, instead, SSD should maybe used into a hybrid caching/tier technology instead.

What do I mean by a hybrid caching/tier technology? Simly put, the FC software will smartly move data that is constinly access to faster medium base on the mediums' speed instead. This way as SSD becomes cheaper and faster, replaceing older SSD and HDD will be simpler and easyer also as that data will be freed and moved to the faster mediums as more rooms becomes available. This alone will increase read speeds with the L1 and L2 working away gathering and moving information that will speed up applcations load and performance. Write also would see a performances form that fact that disk head will be free up simply by taking the read load off the drive.

That sounds great you might say, but what if I switch off HDD and on to SSD instead? What speeds would I see from that? Well, FC would be able to still use its L1 to cache data's Read commands and load them up faster. Why reads only? As talk about from the Link above on many pages, RAM is very risky as a write mediums. If power goes out, system crashes, or hardware failer, that data would be lost forever where read data would still be ok as that data was just a copy of it self. FC could still keep writes but as an advance option to still give the users the power of choice, but keep them from hurting themselves as bad if they don't know all the risk from turning it on. A warrnings would be poping up talking about the risk about these features and a bit more detailed how risky each feature could be.

It also would still be able to grade your SSD performance as each SSD might perform different than the other. For example, SandForce offers a perty nice all around speed up in terms of reads and writes, but Indexs(sp) offers even faster/better read speeds even if the write speeds are not that greate. FC would be able to finde the best way to setup that data to take advantage of the IOs of both by moving write data to the SandForce drive and mostly read data to the Index(s) drive instead without really having to know that SanForce or Index(s) was the controler.

Note this is a WIP, I just wanted a place to store my thought, so I could access it anywhere as I tend to move around a lot. The idea is for FC in a much later version. The idea came to me after watching the said video above and remembing haveing a talk with FC support about when SSD become cheap/faster enough FC might not work anymore. This option/thought would still give life to FC even if that happens. It would make FC a mid ground between the different type of stroage that is around in both customers and enterpise enviroments.

[kalua]

FC still make sense with SSD.

For example, small and random writes are MUCH faster with FC in front of the SSD. And a LARGE FC smokes even SSD, when the entire file will fit in cache.

Realize too, that even SSD is not fast enough for some. I'm running a 1GB RAID0 made of up 4x256GB SAMSUNG 830 SSDs on an Areca caching controller.

Enabling write caching is a no brainer... I always enable it. I've seen plenty of systems corrupted from power outages even w/o write caching. If you system or data is that precious, then you ought to have a UPS.

[Mradr]

Enabling write caching is a no brainer... I always enable it. I've seen plenty of systems corrupted from power outages even w/o write caching. If you system or data is that precious, then you ought to have a UPS.

It's not always about the system loseing power, but the system having a hickup... for example, what if the GPU just fails in the run time? That would mean the system will blue screen and crash out leaving any data that was in ram gon still as the the OS doesn't close the programs (it just hard restarts it self).

So, no. Enableing write caching is still risky. Even Read caching can be if done wrong or edited without FC knowing. You can read over all that in the post above this as we went over the safty of usething caching for say.

FC still make sense with SSD.

For example, small and random writes are MUCH faster with FC in front of the SSD. And a LARGE FC smokes even SSD, when the entire file will fit in cache.

It wont make much sense to use FC with SSD unless FC starts to see different levels of speed within its cacheing storage limits.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&s ... 80&bih=968
If you look it up, memristor will one day replace both ram and storage. They're talking about within 2 years or 2013-14 this will be on the market in SSD formates. This means both ram and storage will all be in one package very soon instead of what we're doing now spliting the ram and storage up. Want faster temp space? Just buy a faster hard drive. Want more temp space? Just buy a bigger storage drive.

So yes, at one point, FC will be useless ^^; One way to get around that will be to offer a way to store and move that data on to faster solutions automagicly instread "you" moving the data around like we are with SSD and HDD already (You know, installing the OS onto the SSD and data programs onto the HDD). FC could one day automagicly "see" what data could be moved were to be better access and just move that data there for us.