Posted on 06/08/2011 2:00:19 PM PDT by Red Badger
Diskeeper Corp developed "ExpressCache," software that enhances operating speed of personal computers (PCs) by using a small-capacity SSD as a cache for HDD, and demonstrated it at Computex Taipei 2011.
In the demonstration, operations such as booting Windows 7 and launching applications were compared between a PC equipped with a 500-Gbyte HDD (5,400rpm) and a PC using the same hardware in addition to an 8-Gbyte SSD for a cache (made by SanDisk Corp, connected via mSATA). As a result, the software and the SDD halved the time it takes to perform those operations.
ExpressCache is software that monitors the read/write operations of applications software and duplicates frequently-used data in an SSD. It operates as one of the components of Windows 7. Though an SSD with any capacity can be used as a cache, 4-Gbyte or higher capacity will be more effective than capacities lower than that.
"Considering the balance between the prices and effects of current SSDs, 8-Gbyte capacity might be the best," said Modesto Rodriguez, vice president, OEM Business Development of Diskeeper, which will sell ExpressCache to PC makers. "It's not that the operating speeds increase in proportion to the capacity of SSD. So, we expect that PC makers decide the capacity in consideration of the prices of SSDs."
At Computex Taipei 2011, Intel Corp announced a similar technology called "Smart Response Technology." Commenting on this technology, Rodriguez said, "ExpressCache has an advantage that it can be used with any types of SSDs and HDDs with any capacities and does not require any specific hardware configurations."
Intel said that Smart Response Technology can be used only with the Z68 chipset and is best used with a 20-Gbyte SSD.
"In addition, Intel uses SLC-based SSDs, which are expensive," Rodriguez said. "When ExpressCache is combined with an 8-Gbyte MLC-based SSD, the price of the SSD can be reduced to about 1/4."
Great! Now I can only watch two episodes of Seinfeld while Old Betsy is booting up.
My Windows 7 boots to the start application in under a minute.
tech bkmk
It’s not only boot time, everything is faster.
I remember back in my geek days when I used to play Battlefield and other 3D shooters and constantly had to upgrade my system to keep up with the latest. Always adding more memory, new motherboards, faster processors, video cards and bus speeds... Nothing compared to when I bought my first WD Raptor 10,000 RPM, 36gb hard drive back in the day. Wow! Programs seemed to load instantly and the upgrade was immediately noticeable. Computer seemed like it tripled in speed.
Just bought a Corsair 128gb SSD and going to use it as my boot HD and put files on the 1TB drive.
Solid State Drive......no moving parts.........
I’ve booted off flash drive before; even with some intervening crap (I think there was a floppy drive involved, to load the boot routine and USB driver), it was pretty danged fast. In the misspent youth days, booting an Apple IIgs off battery-backed-up memory card was so freaking fast (and silent) that we’d restart just to watch it again. And then the DMA SCSI cards came out, and those were fast. Of course, the entire OS fit on an 800K floppy...
I had a friend who booted off of dual 15K drives striped in a RAID 0, hooked to a pretty hefty SCSI RAID card with gobs of cache. It was impressive, everything was practically instant. Seems there's no limit to what people going for the ultimate gaming rig will do.
I had an HP SmartArray PCI card with 512MB cache in my old desktop server booting to three 300 GB 15K Ultra320 SCSI disks in a RAID5. Server 2003 took less than 10 seconds to come up to a login screen. With 32 GB RAM and two dual-core Intel procs, it could run just about anything, but my God did it just gobble up power!
It takes 15 seconds.
But why would you ever shut it down (except for doing a big upgrade)? I only did to see how long it took. Takes about 5 seconds to shut down, BTW.
But, in normal use, you just open/close the lid. Instantaneous.
My Fedora workstation takes a while to boot and load KDE, but it is something that happens rarely enough that I don't give a damn.
~ :) uptime 10:57:30 up 153 days, 18:01, 18 users, load average: 1.04, 1.08, 1.08
Why not just use something that doesn't need to be booted every hour?
I have servers at work that have been up for more than 1300 days.
11:01am up 1333 day(s), 19:23, 2 users, load average: 1.21, 0.69, 0.56
That's more than 3 and a half years. Even if that server took 10 minutes to boot, (which it doesn't) it would still pay off.
I predict that the old HDD will soon go the way of the 5 1/4” FLOPPY, in favor of the SDD. Faster, more reliable, more secure...............
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