Show HN: Diskache – Combine SSD with HDD on Windows | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Diskache – Combine SSD with HDD on Windows

diskache.io

21 pointslostmsu19 comments

With the now relatively-low price of SSDs, I don't personally see a huge need for this. Maybe 4+ years ago, but not now.

That is so very true. The worst part is - I had a prototype in 2012, but never actually finished it until now. Hope this will find its place in enterprise, where every dollar matters.

Do you want to open it up or make it possible to extend? I want to experiment with this, but not having the caching code and SSD handling code for the windows kernel doesn't help. There are no reliable and trustworthy alternatives.

Have you tried to combine RAM and SSD caching already?

8TB SSDs are still kind of expensive, and when you get to fill just half of that with a few million files on a HDD, just listing the drive contents becomes painfully slow. It surely wouldn't hurt to keep the small files and directories cached on an SSD with several orders of magnitude faster random access.

No one I know of has an 8TB SSD. Even a 1TB SSD is rather spacious, unless you carry your entire DVD and music collection with you. I thought we had clouds and NASes for that stuff.

Games. Modern games are huge. My Steam folder is just over 400 gig, and I've got only 28 programs in it.

That's my point. You would still have lots of space left on a 1TB SSD.

Lightly compressed (= high dynamic range, low amount of compression artefacts -> possible to still do postproduction) video takes a lot of space. 1080p is easily at least 50 Mbps (6MB/s+). Same for 4k video is probably at least 100 Mbps (but I'd guess less than 200 Mbps).

1 TB is nothing for video like that.

The other big problem is that there's less and less people using anything but the notebooks, where it's effectively either HDD or SSD.

So far I am not so impressed with ssd cache of HDD; people don't perceive mean latency so much as tail latency so long as you have an HDD attached to a windows machine it will take a lunch break.

That's not so true. I'm usually very annoyed, when navigating my pictures or video collection, and thumbnails appear after several seconds. Same with large folders.

So, this is essentially a Windows version of OS X's Fusion Drive?

Or flashcache: https://github.com/facebook/flashcache Or bcache: https://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/

Shower thought about this: Instead of create a ULTRA FAST virtual disk by unused memory such as ramdisk, diskache.io can create a ULTRA LARGE virtual disk to cache.

Not sure I understand your idea. Windows already caches reads to some degree in RAM. This project gives less speed, than RAM disk, but allows to cache much more.

Something that has been on mac for years now and still not in windows :D

Well, actually: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Response_Technology (2011)

I have to agree with maxpert. When Windows 10 was about to be out, I was ready to bury that project, because both Linux, and OS X already had that, and I expected MS to integrate something similar. However, 1 year later it is still only available in Windows Server, and extremely hard to configure.

Regarding SRT - it is good, but bound to a particular hardware, so does not suite everyone.

WD/HGST purchased the former Velobit company and their product morphed into ServerCache, which was Flash-based disk caching for Linux and Windows.

http://www.itpath.it/2014/08/20/hgst-virident-servercache-2/

The product was EOLd last year though, probably due to lack of corporate interest.

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