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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

HYBRID hard drives

Tom.Wong

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Well it's not a new concept by any means. It's a hard drive with a relatively large second level intelligent cache. Seagate used to do this exact same thing with their enterprise SCSI drives back in the early '90s, I think they were the first to do it back then. Funny how tech comes and goes and comes back again. Of course, back then it was just a few MB's of fast page DRAM instead of a 4GB NAND based SSD cache on these new units. Also not unlike high performance RAID controllers that stack up GB's of secondary cache to boost performance.

The big advantage this time around over the RAM implementation in the past, is the SSD portion can store often-used information when powered-down and they're much smarter this time around -- these new drives appear to be much better at knowing which bits to cache based on its other activity.

I may grab me a 500GB model to put in the Macbook Pro. Nothing wrong with my 7200rpm 500GB that's in there now, other than it's slow. And I'm too cheap to spend $1400 on a good 480GB SSD.
 
I think my old laptop just got in line for an upgrade.
 
Anyone know if this would work as an inexpensive way to offload footage... say for instance on set via a laptop to a eSata docking station with one of these drives? They may be inexpensive enough to serve as master and backup, it would seem.
 
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you could throw an enclosure around it, or they make docks you can sled drives and connect esata. I think these will compliment istoragepro's very well, and boost the performance of them and keep things load cost, and give you raid configurations too.
 
Remember the speed only helps in often accessed files so this will have no impact on speed offloading from drives/CF etc. Makes a great system drive in raid though.
 
true, and hopefully they'll bring this method of making drives and improve it overall on 3.5 inch disks too. Jeff, this may be the solution to getting better performance out of 2 TB drives you've been ranting about so much... :)
 
you could throw an enclosure around it, or they make docks you can sled drives and connect esata. I think these will compliment istoragepro's very well, and boost the performance of them and keep things load cost, and give you raid configurations too.
Yeah, I use a Startech eSata docking station on my workstation for storage. Using 1.5 TB Seagates at present. When I need to look at different footage, I just pop in the drive it's on and offload it onto my D: RAID 0 and work from that. Seems the single drive in the docking station may be the bottleneck that would keep me from working directly from the docked drive. I think they are already selling USB 3.0 docking stations so with this drive having a 3GB buffer and probably soon as SATA 3 (I think that's what it's called) it might be possible to work with Epic footage from a dock? i've got the external RAID 0 single disk enclosures scattered all over the place (three sets on different computers) and I really prefer the docking station that is easily moved from one computer to another and has a relatively small footprint.
 
it's "theoretically" possible to work with any sort of RED footage from a variety of drives. It's just about the level of performance you are willing to perform with. I've had to, and have worked with R3D files off a fw400 maxtor drive. It was pretty painful, and ESATA/usb 3.0/new flavors of esata will all have its bottlenecks eventually. It will probably get you through proxy/offline workflow and then for a long online process. You'll need faster connections like SAS-FIBER with large raid capacities to get top notch performance. They also make docking stations where you can sled in externally 2 drives at once so you can create more raid 0 setups. Organization is key to ease and lower footprint. :)
 
They also make docking stations where you can sled in externally 2 drives at once so you can create more raid 0 setups. Organization is key to ease and lower footprint. :)
Wasn't aware of the RAID 0 docking stations... thought they just rolled from one drive to the other when full. Good to hear. RAID good.:thumbsup:

Organization? What's THAT about! :)
 
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I may grab me a 500GB model to put in the Macbook Pro. Nothing wrong with my 7200rpm 500GB that's in there now, other than it's slow. And I'm too cheap to spend $1400 on a good 480GB SSD.

Is there a utility or a way to tell a carbon copy clone to put the system on the nand and the rest on the disk?

BTW I can remember back in about '95 when we thought 9 gig hard drives for $1000 was a breakthrough. Now we get 4 gig solid state and 500 gig harddisk for $129.00! :-)
 
the key to these drives though that i've been reading about, you have to load software you using constantly so it "builds into the memory" to have it load faster. Loading FCP for example will load slow first go around, do it by the second or third time, it will load increasingly faster. Also the heavier duty the program/files the better this drive will perform. It's a really interesting piece of tech... at the price point it's def worth a try either way you look at it.


http://storagemojo.com/2010/05/24/seagate-gets-hybrid-ssdhdd-right/comment-page-1/#comment-209399
 
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