solid state disk as read/write cache

dledoux · Tue May 18, 2010 4:40 pm

Is it possible to make a solid state disk the read/write cache for slower disks?

nbarsotti · Tue May 18, 2010 5:17 pm

Yes and No. If you have certian raid contollers from Adaptec of LSI you can buy an extra software/hardware package to enable that functionality.

Adaptec calls their product MaxIQ, LSI calls their prodcut CacheCade.

dledoux · Tue May 18, 2010 6:30 pm

Great find - very interesting products. So these try to tackle the issue on the raid card side rather than the 'ram' side...

Its interesting that starwind can do writeback cache through RAM but not through an SSD. Surely doing that would boost greatly enhance IOPS even if you were writing to very slow cheap disks. It would be safer as well as SSD's don't lose data when the power goes out

Wed May 19, 2010 3:32 pm

StarWind supports both L1 (RAM) and L2 (SSD) caches so far. There's no need in a hardware RAID controller's cache - system RAM is faster compared to RAID's on-board RAM and NVMe is faster than RAID's on-board SATA/SATA SSDs used for caching.

dledoux wrote:Great find - very interesting products. So these try to tackle the issue on the raid card side rather than the 'ram' side...

Its interesting that starwind can do writeback cache through RAM but not through an SSD. Surely doing that would boost greatly enhance IOPS even if you were writing to very slow cheap disks. It would be safer as well as SSD's don't lose data when the power goes out