Adding SSD Ram Drives Hybrid with HDD

manager Mon, 12/24/2012 - 22:07

Questions:

  • Does it make sense to build a Linux software RAID-1 (mirroring) using an SSD and a normal hard disk? 
  • If you use Windows 7 to mirror a volume across an SSD drive and a mechanical hard drive, will the read performance be similar to a single SSD drive?

Answer:

Yes, in tests with two hard drives, read performance was as good as the fastest hard drive but write performance was as bad as the slowest.

According to the answer at Hybrid SSD/HDD RAID, it seems there are raid controllers/software that will intelligently bias the reads towards the SSD, so you won't lose performance by raiding it.

Further keywords for searching:

 

  • linux ssd raid hybrid
  • mdadm "--write-mostly" ssd

Further links:

 

(Source: superuser)