eBoostr + ultra high speed expresscard = alterative to SSD?

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eBoostr + ultra high speed expresscard = alterative to SSD?

(29 posts) (4 voices)

Started 7 years ago by Doug
Latest reply from BernhardH

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Doug
Beta Veteran

Wintec and Aluratec recently came out with expresscards boasting 115MB/s read and 65MB/s write speed. These figures are significantly faster than traditional USB and expresscard memory devices, and approach the performance of low-end SSDs.

http://www.wintecind.com/FileMate/index_solidgo.htm

It seems to me that eBoostr, with some modifications, could turn these devices into an alternative SSD for notebook users like myself.

Here would be the advantages:

1) Fits flush in the expresscard slot; no profile change or USB flash drives hanging off my laptop.

2) Easy and fast installation. No swapping hard drives, making/restoring images, or installing new operating systems. Simply plug in the expresscard and have eBoostr build the cache.

3) Huge cost savings. I currently have a 320GB WD Scorpio Black HDD. To buy an SSD capable of replacing that storage capacity would easily be $850 or more. I can buy one of the high speed expresscard SSDs for just over $125.

4) Solves the stuttering and performance degradation problems that many SSDs experience. Stuttering is eliminated because eBoostr directs writes to the hard drive, then periodically updates the cache on the expresscard in a background operation during an idle time. Performance degradation is likely eliminated or, if not, much easier to correct: simply reformat the SSD and rebuild the cache.

5) Can dispense with the memory cache and pick up usable memory, if desired.

6) Greater configuration flexibility from having the second hard drive.

To take full advantage of the possibilities that these card offer, eBoostr would have to allow me to pin entire directories to the cache. For instance, I’d like to place all of my program files on the cache, whether they are “frequently used files” or not. Perhaps eBoostr already allows me to do this, but I’m not certain that it does. This is only an educated guess as to how the program works, but I suspect that it only caches “frequently used files” (what ever that means). It does allow me to assign priority to certain applications, but I'd like more control than that.

BTW, adding the appropriate capabilities to eBoostr could open whole new marketing channels for it. I don’t see the cost of SSDs coming down significantly anytime soon. eBoostr plus one of these devices could give laptop users 80% of the performance gain from an SSD, at a fraction of the cost.

Thoughts?

Posted 7 years ago #
chooky
Beta Veteran

It is faster than a USB drive although it still has a USB 2 interface. Memory is still much quicker for the price. I think a RAM cache will out perform it. What is the maximum amount of RAM can you put in your notebook and how much do you have now? When they have a USB 3 interface it will be a closer race.

Posted 7 years ago #
Doug
Beta Veteran

Actually, I don't believe it uses the USB interface (if it did its speeds would be much lower).

My laptop's memory is maxed out at 3GB, but memory is really only a minor issue here. It's really about a way to get most of the speed benefits of an SSD without sacrificing storage capacity, or paying $600 for a 256GB SSD. And, it IS easier to implement than having to install a new drive and having to migrate one's programs and data.

Finally (and I know that this is specific to my case) my IBM laptop does not support SATA II, so even with a super fast SSD I would only get marginally better performance than these cards offer. As I said, I realize that most won't have that problem, but many people do own older laptops that can't take full advantage of the newer SSDs. As an example, there are lots of laptops out there that use an IDE interface, and while there are PATA SSDs available there are fewer to choose from, they're more expensive, and they're small. But many of these older laptops do have an expresscard slot and so could beneficially use one of these devices to emulate a true SSD.

Posted 7 years ago #
chooky
Beta Veteran

My bad! It has a USB 2 connector so you can use it as an external drive, neat! I should have read more carefully.

Here is another review, looks good! http://www.modsynergy.com/review207.html

Comparing their CrystalMark test against my USB test, the SolidGO has much better figures.

It looks like you can install the OS on it and use your current HDD for storage that does not require speed like music, movies, setup files, and email store. This would be a better use than an eboostr cache as you get faster boot times, software installs, updates, internet cache, temp files and documents, everything would be much faster not just files that are cached.

If you have 3GB of RAM a 1Gb RAM cache would give you a good performance boost.

Posted 7 years ago #
mradr
Member

I wouldn't buy one... why? Cause for that much I could still buy a nice HDD that could reach that speed and have a way bigger space to play with. Until they can get that up to >150-200, I would still get a HDD for little around $60-70. You could just wait a year and get a SSD when they become main stream for around $250-400 at 512GB of space at the SATA II cap.

Finally (and I know that this is specific to my case) my IBM laptop does not support SATA II, so even with a super fast SSD I would only get marginally better performance than these cards offer.

Not so true... or they are working on a work around. From what I have read is that you can still plug in your SSD into your PCI slots and gain everything + more (if they are faster then the SATA II) with a converter. Witch sounds perty neat and I hear alot of SDD may just change to the PCI way due to SATA changes being slow and storage media being way way faster then they have ever been. Now I'm not sure if this will work for laptops for say, but I wouldn't dout someone found a way to get it to work under a laptop.

Posted 7 years ago #
chooky
Beta Veteran

I wouldn't buy one... why? Cause for that much I could still buy a nice HDD that could reach that speed and have a way bigger space to play with. Until they can get that up to >150-200, I would still get a HDD for little around $60-70."

We are talking about getting extra speed. Doug already has enough storage.

HDD's will never be as fast as SSD's, mradr.

Posted 7 years ago #
Doug
Beta Veteran

Thanks, Mradr, for your reply. First up, I already have a large HDD (a 320 GB WD Scorpio Black, just about the fastest laptop hard drive made). My specific problem is that I want even better responsiveness (particularly on bootup and app loads) just because, but I'm unwilling to give up my storage capacity to buy an SSD that's within my budget. And, I suspect that there are lots of folks out there with the same set of desires. To make it clear, any SATA SSD will work fine in my laptop. It's just a matter of not wanting to pay through the nose to get one of decent size.

Then there is the problem that SSD technology is still not mature. The newer drives have solved the stuttering problem, but the performance degradation problem is still with us. What other problems will be uncovered down the road? Platter HDDs are slow, but they are sure and the technology is mature.

So My thought was that one of these high-speed expresscards could give me a substantial performance boost, without the problems inherent in SSDs. And yes, at some point I'll almost certainly ditch my HDD for an SSD, just not now.

Go here http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16820161325 to read the experience of someone who did exactly what I'm talking about, except he didn't use eBoostr. (It is the 9/21/2009 review)

eBoostr would greatly simplify what that guy did, and even improve upon it in my opinion. But to take full advantage of eBoostr's capabilities as a drive cache it should have the ability to pin entire directories to it.

Finally, I'm intrigued by your comments about using PCI slots in place of SATA. Can you tell me more about that?

Thanks.

Posted 7 years ago #
Doug
Beta Veteran

Thanks for your reply, too, Chooky. How do you think that one of these cards would work with eBoostr?

Posted 7 years ago #
Doug
Beta Veteran

Chooky, perhaps I should have made my question clearer. If you could, please check out the 9-21-2009 review on this page:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16820161325
and tell me if you see any ways to improve upon what that guy did, especially by using eBoostr. I'm just trying to get a handle on how well this thing would work, and if there are any hidden problems, before I buy one.

Thanks for your help!

Posted 7 years ago #
mradr
Member

Doug:
They would work perty good actully, but again I still don't think they are worth it due to low space and speeds compare to the lower end of the SSD market. Also, they too suffer from the write limit. I would totally just wait one more year and your'll see some great things come out then. One is, a few new SSD controllers that have raised the write limit to 5 years writing 50GB (maybe MB? Perty sure its GB.) a day to the drive, which is alot compare to all of em.

For example of the SSD being cheaper then the card.
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820169002

Not available for ReadyBoost under Vista using the ExpressCard interface (not a fault of this card)
It'll still work for eboostr I'm sure, the card is read like a drive and thats how eboostr reads to put its storage cache.

Chooky:
We are talking about getting extra speed. Doug already has enough storage.
HDD's will never be as fast as SSD's, mradr.

I know x.x;, I never said space was more better then the speeds. Why I gived numbers of speed and not space... I know of some HDD that can do a perty good job on read speeds vs the SDD for half the price tho.

Actully your wrong when you say HDD will never be as fast... for the lower cost of the middle/higher end I could build a perty nice raid 0 and cap the SATA II mark, just random I/O is what SSD have over the HDD, but even then, that raid perty nice for space, speed, and price. Also, that raid isnt cap by the SATA, its cap by how fast your north B can go, so we're talking about ... 100 avg for each drive with 32 MB of cach... around 350 GB read for 4 of these drivers with the space of around 2.6TB for around $400. Also look up the new um.. square drive, its HDD but in a new way of thinking (not really new, just took them forever to make the drive).

Posted 7 years ago #
chooky
Beta Veteran

If you can make it your bootable OS drive, that would be your best option. How much of your HDD are you using now? How much of that is your My documents, My pictures, My Videos type folders. I have an 2 x 30GB SSD's in RAID 0 and have used a 30GB partition for my OS since I got them. I keep all my data and downloads and anything that does not benefit from the speed of the SSD's on my old HDD. I it is bootable on your notebook I would get a copy of Windows 7 and install that on it which will also make your notebook feel snappier by being Windows 7 and by being a new install.

Plugging storage directly into a PCI express slot can give you some serious speed! Have a look at this beauty! Expensive but very fast! http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_z_drive_m84_pci_express_ssd

Posted 7 years ago #
Doug
Beta Veteran

Thanks, guys, for the replies. Mradr, you're right about HDDs in raid competing with SSDs. And you might be right that the performance gains from this expresscard don't justify its cost. That's what I'm trying to figure out. The problem I have is that I'm using a laptop, not a desktop, and it only has a slot for one hard drive. So raid is not an option for me. And that also eliminates the express slot option you mentioned, Chooky, although that almost makes me want to give up my laptop (which I won't) for a desktop. :)

Regarding your suggestions, Chooky, the reviews indicate that Windows (no matter what flavor) doesn't recognize it as a boot device, although MAC OS/X does. Unfortunately all of my necessary apps are Windows-based.

My current thinking is that I could get by with the 24GB model. Currently my eBoostr cache file only fills about 7GB, and I try to cache everything that I can onto it (I use an 8GB Lexar expresscard, but it is quite a bit slower than the card I'm considering). That would still leave plenty of space for the page file, and possibly selected data files. Anything else I could put on it profitably?

One final point. I'm trying to work this out, not just for myself but for other laptop users that find themselves in the same conundrum I'm in. Laptops are slower to incorporate the latest technology, and their upgrade options are severely limited because of lack of slots, and because so much old technology is hard-wired into the mother board. I cannot, for instance, simply upgrade my hard drive controller and go to 3.0GB SATA speeds. And, even though I have an IBM T60p w/ Core 2 Duo (IBM's top-of-the-line model just a few years ago) I'm limited by engineering decisions IBM made: even though the mother board accepts 4GB of memory it only recognizes 3GB (a BIOS issue) and the SATA controller purposefully disabled SATA II capability. Those are my particular issues; my point is that owners of older laptops often suffer constraints that desktop users don't. So I'm trying to figure out an effective and cost-effective upgrade path for others in my situation. And I'm hoping that eBoostr can be part of the solution. I believe that if eBoostr added pinning capability as I suggested it would open up new marketing opportunities for them. Memory constraints are not the only constraints that laptop users face.

Thanks again, guys.

Posted 7 years ago #
mradr
Member

I think your better off upgrading the laptop then instead of just putting the $100 in, but to save some money here are a few cheaper versions at the same speed and size.

http://www.amazon.com/Aluratek-Filemate-Solid-ExpressCard-AWSSDE48F/dp/B002K1ZW50/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1255630235&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Wintec-FileMate-Ultra-ExpressCard-3FMS4D48M-WR/dp/B001QSZDJ8/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1255630235&sr=1-3

Posted 7 years ago #
chooky
Beta Veteran

From what I read it is really up to your bios if the SSD is bootable. Mac Pro just seems to be one of those bios. So it may be bootable on your notebok. The only way to find out is to buy one unfortunately. You didn't answer my questions about how much of your current HDD you are using. You can get a 60GB OCZ Vertex SSD for US$229 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227394 and make your current drive an external with an enclosure.

Considering your idea of being able to add whole folders of files to a cache is a good one.
This made me think of another idea for Photoshop users of being able to make a virtual drive inside the cache for a Photoshop scratch disk or any other program that requires a fast temporary storage.

Posted 7 years ago #
mradr
Member

and the SATA controller purposefully disabled SATA II capability.

Going from this, he cant use SATA II drives chooky unless there was a bios update, going to also guess he cant boot from a SSD drive either. Even if he could, hes cap at the 150 mark making some of the SSD sorta useless I would think.... still somewhat faster then a HDD. If anything, I would have to say the card would be a little better vs a SSD cus this way you get both space and speed for this setup type. Now if you had SATA II then I would say go SSD then (like I said above) they are cheaper, much bigger, and way faster then thos exp. cards.
(Note, unless bios says otherwise, all SATA is backwards compatible, you just run at the slowest connection.)

Also if its not bootable... I wouldner if you can just put the startup file off site to a bootable drive and then tell it to boot from the SSD. Nothing says you cant, so I would think that be the best way if the SSD wasn't bootable when you got one same with your expresscard. Now where you get that off site drive is sorta a problem, but I bet we could come up with something if we have to. This way you can have either your SSD or the expresscard be your boot drive with your programs and if you do go with the expresscard, make your HDD your media storage drive for your music/pagefiles/what ever you want.

Again tho, I say just let the SSD mature one more year and you'll be happy you waited that one year. I have talk to many SSD companies about their SSD for next year, and most, if not all, blow the SATA II cap out of the water. Even the new SATA III cap seems to all ready reachable and with some going to the new PCI, they too blow the "fish" out of the water when it comes to speed. Another thing is life and space of the SSD, they will be around 1.5-3x greater with alot of em hitting the 512GB mark and 5 years of life under perty heavy use. I say they will live around 4-8 years depending on how you use them.

Posted 7 years ago #
BernhardH
Member

Exactly my thought when I bought my SSD - I shopped a PCI-E ExpressCard Verbatim 32 Gig and a 16 Gig for my PC and the PC of my colleague (Dell Vostro 1510 and Dell XPS 1330). However, even though test programs attribute a solid speed, my system starts to stutter when multiple files are accessed at the same time, eventually leading to (get this!) the loss of connectivity of the WLAN / Ethernet ports. On both Laptops, with different chipsets. Verbatim has only confirmed another issue with VMWare, which should not affect this (replacement time: 4-6 weeks, great...)

Unfortunately, this also means that the hourly cache refresh of eBoostr kills my Internet connection, it does not happen during the regular performance boosting. eBoostr support is looking into this, but so far no remedy has been found.

I have tried:

Write cache on/off, performance option on/off, flashfire installed/deinstalled, superfetch on/off, upgrading from XP to Vista (in XP, my system would lose the Internet connection every 3-5 minutes or so)

Nothing worked so far :(

Cheers,

Bernhard

Posted 7 years ago #
chooky
Beta Veteran

Bernhard the controllers used in the low end SSD's (read 125MB/sec, write 30MB/sec) do have stuttering problems when trying to read and write at the same time. The mid range SSD's like the Vertex (read 230MB/sec, write 135MB/sec) with Indilinx controllers do not stutter. SSD's are still a new technology and getting new firmware regularly to get out the kinks. Can't see why it would disconnect your internet though.

Posted 7 years ago #
BernhardH
Member

Hi Chooky,

thank you for your reply - indeed, the stuttering almost disappears when using flashfire or other tools. I can just explain it this way, that the access overload somehow kills the ExpressCard Bus, and the WLAN/LAN which seem to be on the same bus don't recover.

Really strange problem. I intend to upgrade to Win7 today, if I dig out our serials, I'll keep you posted ;)

Cheers,

Bernhard

Posted 7 years ago #
mradr
Member

I could see why, I mean, expresscard bus wasn't meant to be used like that... or wasn't design at the time for that, so I could see why its doing that. Overall, like you said, the expresscard bus is being flooded by your SSD card and your networking cards have to fight for that control back. Chooky, think about how the USB have to fight other USB if the controler is all ready at its max with one USB.

One work around would be to do "flash" reading. It uses the idea base on how ram works to refresh it self. You send data request in "flashes" of a few ms apart, giving some time between calls for other devices... but it would cause your SSD to be a little slower due to it having to give up some of its time and a little of its bandwith for the calls and checking to see if the data bandwith is even free for its flashes. Not sure how you go about doing that... (lol its just some idea I thought up, not sure if it would even work).

Posted 7 years ago #
Doug
Beta Veteran

Thanks, guys, this is REALLY helpful information! To respond to several of you at one time:

BernhardH: what you've reported is one reason I've held off buying one of these cards. I was afraid that it was just too good to be true. It seems that there is a stuttering problem after all. thanks for sharing your experience!

Chooky: to respond to your question, I currently don't use anywhere near the full capacity of my HDD. I could get by with a n 80GB X25-M, but I would like to have a larger drive to store photos, etc. Currently I am using around 80GB, but if I installed an SSD I could get some of that back by disabling pagefile, hibernation, and similar tweaks. But 80GB would still be a bit small.

Mradr: I do think that you are right, that in the end I will be better off just waiting until prices come down and then buying an SSD. Unfortunately I'll still be limited to 150MB/s read speeds so long as I stick with this laptop. If I could pick up one of these expresscards for around $40-50 I might still be tempted to try it, though.

Regardless of whether my idea of using these expresscards as an SSD alternative stands or falls, do you think it would be a useful addition to eBoostr to be able to pin entire directories to the cache?

Posted 7 years ago #
BernhardH
Member

Doug, just to set things straight: in regular operation, eBoostr and my SSD work together like a charm, and the system really speeds up! It's just the cache rebuild, that brings everything down :(

Win 7 seemed to be no help, unfortunately (other than having to update samba now, grrr)

Cheers,

Bernhard

Posted 7 years ago #
chooky
Beta Veteran

Bernhard and Doug you probably have done this but have you checked that your notebooks have the latest bios available and all drivers are the latest?

Bernhard You may have to wait a couple of days for Windows 7 to settle down and finish filling its caches and indexes.

Have you tried the SSD Tweaker tool http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=49779

Disabling TRIM in Windows 7 has been known to help with stutter on SSD's that don't support it. Trim is enabled by default but can be turned off. You can use the "fsutil behavior query|set DisableDeleteNotify" command to query or set Trim.

Posted 7 years ago #
mradr
Member

Regardless of whether my idea of using these expresscards as an SSD alternative stands or falls, do you think it would be a useful addition to eBoostr to be able to pin entire directories to the cache?

Can you give any more detail about this? Not sure where your going with this thought.

Posted 7 years ago #
chooky
Beta Veteran

Maybe it would be better for the eBoostr team to develop a separate product that is just a read and write RAM disk that can use unmanaged memory and works better than the other RAM disks on the market. They seem to have the best expertise in this area.

Posted 7 years ago #
Doug
Beta Veteran

BernardH:

I'm wondering if the problems you're experiencing could be an extreme case of the "performance degradation" problem that SSDs have? Once all of the cells are written to once, write amplification occurs and writes slow down considerably. I've wondered whether these SSDs suffer this problem. If so, it seems that periodically removing the cache, performing garbage collection, and then rebuilding the cache might help. Have you tried "trimming" it? Some users here http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=56855 report that they can use CCleaner as an easy Trim alternative.

Posted 7 years ago #
chooky
Beta Veteran

CCleaner wipe free space is a myth. I have tested it on my SSD's and researched it thoroughly. It actually degrades performance. It will depend on if the SSD manufacturer makes available a Garbage collection utility for that controller and or the firmware supports TRIM.

Posted 7 years ago #
mradr
Member

chooky:
CCleaner wipe free space is a myth.

I just download the program and also find this true. From how it works is it creats a bit for each point and then deletes it. This is adding a write cycle to the drive degrading its life over time by alot! I would say it will work, but at the cost of the life of the drive... its not worth it...

It will depend on if the SSD manufacturer makes available a Garbage collection utility for that controller and or the firmware supports TRIM.

Yea, if you can get a drive with TRIM or a some sorta Garbage collection utility, you should be good for a while with older gen drives.

Also, I wounder if compressing the data befor its writen will help for both the life and space on a flash base drive.

Posted 7 years ago #
BernhardH
Member

Chooky: bios & drivers at the latest, of course. The SSD Tweaker would be useful if I ran my whole system on the SSD, no?

Doug: I don't think so. I use 24 Gig of my 32 Gig drive, leaving ample space to not run into this.

Sigh. Well, I hope that eBoostr finds a way to get around this stupid hardware issue.

Cheers,

Bernhard

Posted 7 years ago #
BernhardH
Member

Hi there,

I have tried setting the idletime for the cache refresh to higher values (= 1 hour or so), and that seems to have cleared up the problem! No idea what the other implications are, but at least for now, I'm a happy camper ;)

Cheers,

Bernhard

Posted 7 years ago #

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