So over the last two days i tried to play around with some of the new features of my new mobo. One things I wanted to test was the SSD caching feature as I was keen to speed up my 1,5GB Data HD and re-use it in conjunction with old 128GB Vertex SSD. My OS and programmes already sit on a 256GB Samsung SSD.
Most of the commercial solutions you can currently buy like OCZ Synapse seem to offer only software for caching your main boot/systems drive, which I was not interested in.
Even though connecting both drives correctly (you can only use certain SATA ports for the SSD and HDD) the ASUS Suite miserably failed to offer me the SSD caching option as per handbook. So I took out the “software middleman” and decided to use the Marvell Storage Utility (MSU) tool directly and fiddle about with the feature referred to by Marvell as “HyperDuo”.
Effectively this seems to be some sort of Raid derivative function where you can either configure your drives in a “Safe” mode where the SSD is only used for caching purposes with all original files remaining on the HDD or a “Capacity” mode combining the storage of both but with limited security and not being reversible as the data is split across. I decided to give the “safe” mode a go.
The software itself is fairly lean and easy to use once you have the documentation and features googled. The only strange element is that the software is configured via your web browser on your local machine and the installation took approx 5-6 hours for my data drive.
Overall there seems to be a lack of documentation about this feature so this took some time for me to get my head around. You find a lot of marketing info but especially when it came to how to use and configure the MSU software information is very limited. With all caching features the results heavily depend on the sort of data access patterns and the caching function is still in the process of settling in to the usage patterns on my system. The more often you use files the better the results are. So far I’m quite happy with what I’m seeing especially when accessing extensive data folders on my data drive for movies or pictures in large icon view. To generate the Icon previews really took some time on the old drive and this is now instant.
Overall so far so good...I know that a lot of people don’t like using the Marvell SATA ports but so far I’m quite impressed how they perform and if you don't like the feature it is easy to revert.
What was your experience with it?
Most of the commercial solutions you can currently buy like OCZ Synapse seem to offer only software for caching your main boot/systems drive, which I was not interested in.
Even though connecting both drives correctly (you can only use certain SATA ports for the SSD and HDD) the ASUS Suite miserably failed to offer me the SSD caching option as per handbook. So I took out the “software middleman” and decided to use the Marvell Storage Utility (MSU) tool directly and fiddle about with the feature referred to by Marvell as “HyperDuo”.
Effectively this seems to be some sort of Raid derivative function where you can either configure your drives in a “Safe” mode where the SSD is only used for caching purposes with all original files remaining on the HDD or a “Capacity” mode combining the storage of both but with limited security and not being reversible as the data is split across. I decided to give the “safe” mode a go.
The software itself is fairly lean and easy to use once you have the documentation and features googled. The only strange element is that the software is configured via your web browser on your local machine and the installation took approx 5-6 hours for my data drive.
Overall there seems to be a lack of documentation about this feature so this took some time for me to get my head around. You find a lot of marketing info but especially when it came to how to use and configure the MSU software information is very limited. With all caching features the results heavily depend on the sort of data access patterns and the caching function is still in the process of settling in to the usage patterns on my system. The more often you use files the better the results are. So far I’m quite happy with what I’m seeing especially when accessing extensive data folders on my data drive for movies or pictures in large icon view. To generate the Icon previews really took some time on the old drive and this is now instant.
Overall so far so good...I know that a lot of people don’t like using the Marvell SATA ports but so far I’m quite impressed how they perform and if you don't like the feature it is easy to revert.
What was your experience with it?