Has anyone tried these hybrid drives for virtualization? (More specifically Hyper-v + Raid or JBOD). I'm interested in how it performs as I'm running a few servers at home, and the disk I/O is killing it, and SSD is too expensive.
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Usually home servers are frowned upon for the site and get questions closed, and this is also very specific to a particular product and shopping questions tend to get closed on the site as well...just a word of warning (especially since hybrid drives are new, and any answers here will be more or less outdated by next month.) – Bart Silverstrim Oct 04 '11 at 12:00
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You'd be far better off asking a general question involving how to improve your disk I/O on a server, posting specs of what is currently used and what you've done to determine the bottlenecks. – Bart Silverstrim Oct 04 '11 at 12:01
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[Why is hosted/server Storage so Expensive](http://serverfault.com/questions/263694/why-is-hosted-storage-so-expensive) – Chris S Oct 04 '11 at 13:02
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"Why is hosted/server Storage so Expensive" Yeah. Buy a bunch of raptor drives and put in a raid 10 hardware raid controller. YOU ARE SO CLEVER. Lets throw money at everyone single problems. – Sleeper Smith Oct 06 '11 at 03:21
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"home servers" could also be "small business installations". There is always great interest in poor man's "enterprise-grade" featuresets, so I would not close this kind of question. – the-wabbit Oct 08 '11 at 14:25
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Raptor drives would not help. But a caching hardware RAID disk controller would.
The main problem with the hybrid drives that I can see from the data sheet (I have never used one) is that the flash part would not cache writes, it is only used as a read cache and mainly there to speed up system and program startup. But it is the writes killing your virtualization performance as reads are (or at least can be) cached within your host's RAM anyway.
the-wabbit
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I don't have any direct experience with these drives, but it could be a good performer. The key thing from the spec sheet:
The Momentus XT uses a proprietary algorithm which monitors drive activity and determines the optimum data to maintain in the NAND Flash for peak responsiveness.
Which tells me that it's doing some kind of dynamic rebalancing of frequently hit data into the flash portion. Since the flash portion is SLC flash rather than MLC, its endurance is higher. Importantly, writes are faster than MLC. With only 4GB of it there won't be much data in the flash portion, but it's likely to be very important data; areas such as file-system metadata tables and possibly journals.
In a virtualization environment they'd perform a bit faster than the same size of regular drives. But how much faster I couldn't guess.
sysadmin1138
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