May 22, 2012 at 12:01Upgrade your hard drive! This method really works!
Over the past decade, the very concept of a computer has changed very much, but not all bottlenecks have yet been eliminated. One of these bottlenecks is a hard drive. It is his labors that the operating system often cannot boot from a cold start in 10 seconds. There is, of course, SSD, but it is difficult to use it as the main storage due to its small volume. And it turns out that even an SSD cannot break the modern architecture: there is slow storage and fast RAM.
RAM, though fast, is volatile. The hard drive is reliable, non-volatile, but slow. But the SSD and faster than the hard drive and non-volatile. In the future, the SSD (or its successor) is simply obliged to replace both the RAM and the hard drive, but in the meantime, with its help, you can significantly speed up the computer.
In home computers, SSDs are no longer uncommon. Often they create a system partition on it, put the OS and heavy software on it (they say that even Photoshop starts to fly), and they continue to store music and movies on the hard drive.
In servers, when it is necessary for the database to work very quickly, but it is no longer possible to drive it into memory, you can order yourself an SSD as a carrier and the database comes to life. Until the space on the SSD runs out. And the order of cunning RAID arrays or cluster gathering begins.
In 2011, Intel introduced a technology-savvy technology called Smart Response Technology (SRT), which uses SSDs as a cache buffer between RAM and a hard drive. You can use SSDs up to 64GB in size, and not the files themselves are cached, but the requested logical blocks from the hard drive, and if the SSD is suddenly full, then cells that have not been accessed for a long time will begin to be filled with new data. This SRT acts just like Linux with RAM, well done.
If everything is clear with reading, then things are more interesting with writing and there are two modes of use: the fastest and the most advanced. In advanced mode, data is recorded simultaneously on the SSD and on the hard drive. This mode is slower than the first, but reliable and ensures that the data will be stored on your hard drive, no matter what happens. Naturally, the data is stored on the SSD and on subsequent access, the system receives it very quickly.
In a speed-optimized mode, the data is first stored on the SSD, and on the hard disk with a delay, when there is a suitable moment for this (called “delayed recording”). In this mode, the speed of data storage is limited only by the speed of writing to the SSD, but data integrity is not guaranteed - during the recording process the power may turn off (which is not relevant for laptops) or, suddenly, the SSD will fail, and in this case some of the data that did not have time register on the hard drive will be lost. In behavior, this mode reminds me personally of Redis : fast, smart and fairly reliable, but you need to use it wisely.
Caching is implemented through a RAID array, in which you need to add a hard disk and SSD to the BIOS, and SSD must be explicitly specified as a caching device. Such an option is in the BIOS on motherboards with the Z68 chipset.
In BIOS, you only need to enable caching, and after that you can immediately forget how to get to this scary place. Intel makes products for people, therefore, caching is already configured in the system itself using a simple graphical utility:
If an SSD suddenly fails during operation, then if there were no write operations in fast mode, the user will not notice anything: the SSD will fall off completely transparently, and everything just starts to work very slowly, there will only be a feeling of switching from lan to dial-up.
But using only SSD read / write speed would be sacrilege, the second huge bonus is hidden in non-volatility. This means that after the reboot the data as it was in the cache will remain there, and if you often start Photoshop, it will only start for the first time for a long time, and then it will always be fast, even after reboots.
There is a great video where you can see a “slight” increase in speed from using Smart Response Technology:
RAM, though fast, is volatile. The hard drive is reliable, non-volatile, but slow. But the SSD and faster than the hard drive and non-volatile. In the future, the SSD (or its successor) is simply obliged to replace both the RAM and the hard drive, but in the meantime, with its help, you can significantly speed up the computer.
In home computers, SSDs are no longer uncommon. Often they create a system partition on it, put the OS and heavy software on it (they say that even Photoshop starts to fly), and they continue to store music and movies on the hard drive.
In servers, when it is necessary for the database to work very quickly, but it is no longer possible to drive it into memory, you can order yourself an SSD as a carrier and the database comes to life. Until the space on the SSD runs out. And the order of cunning RAID arrays or cluster gathering begins.
In 2011, Intel introduced a technology-savvy technology called Smart Response Technology (SRT), which uses SSDs as a cache buffer between RAM and a hard drive. You can use SSDs up to 64GB in size, and not the files themselves are cached, but the requested logical blocks from the hard drive, and if the SSD is suddenly full, then cells that have not been accessed for a long time will begin to be filled with new data. This SRT acts just like Linux with RAM, well done.
If everything is clear with reading, then things are more interesting with writing and there are two modes of use: the fastest and the most advanced. In advanced mode, data is recorded simultaneously on the SSD and on the hard drive. This mode is slower than the first, but reliable and ensures that the data will be stored on your hard drive, no matter what happens. Naturally, the data is stored on the SSD and on subsequent access, the system receives it very quickly.
In a speed-optimized mode, the data is first stored on the SSD, and on the hard disk with a delay, when there is a suitable moment for this (called “delayed recording”). In this mode, the speed of data storage is limited only by the speed of writing to the SSD, but data integrity is not guaranteed - during the recording process the power may turn off (which is not relevant for laptops) or, suddenly, the SSD will fail, and in this case some of the data that did not have time register on the hard drive will be lost. In behavior, this mode reminds me personally of Redis : fast, smart and fairly reliable, but you need to use it wisely.
Caching is implemented through a RAID array, in which you need to add a hard disk and SSD to the BIOS, and SSD must be explicitly specified as a caching device. Such an option is in the BIOS on motherboards with the Z68 chipset.
In BIOS, you only need to enable caching, and after that you can immediately forget how to get to this scary place. Intel makes products for people, therefore, caching is already configured in the system itself using a simple graphical utility:
If an SSD suddenly fails during operation, then if there were no write operations in fast mode, the user will not notice anything: the SSD will fall off completely transparently, and everything just starts to work very slowly, there will only be a feeling of switching from lan to dial-up.
But using only SSD read / write speed would be sacrilege, the second huge bonus is hidden in non-volatility. This means that after the reboot the data as it was in the cache will remain there, and if you often start Photoshop, it will only start for the first time for a long time, and then it will always be fast, even after reboots.
There is a great video where you can see a “slight” increase in speed from using Smart Response Technology:
Useful comments
- User @ GiBS0N talks about how to achieve performance gains when using SRT.