HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi,

I have always asked this question. How to change or upgrade your HDD cash memory?

A common USB memory is around 1 GB. The largest USB memory I know of has 8GB.

To take advantage of the fast SATA-3 speed would need a larger cash memory. That would also decrees the read from the cylinder, if the file is in the cash, of course.
The SATA high speed comes from the cash and not by reading the cylinder faster.
We all know that the cylinder read/write has a speed of 50-70 MB/s. The cash memory is faster, specially with SATA, 3 Gb/s.
HDD cash is now up on 32MB and probably will increase in the future. But why not go further? Today.

I wouldn't mind to change my drives cash over 1 GB or so. So here are the questions...

1.) Is it possible?
2.) Does the firmware allow it? How to find that out?
2.) How to do it if possible? In a generic description. Or if you have a detailed description, I would love to read that.
3.) What are the thing to consider?
4.) Are there any good tools to measure the efficacy of the HDD?
5.) Who else should I ask if not the HDD-Guru?
etc....


Right now, I don't have any SATA drives. I'll wait until I know which drive to buy where the cash is upgradable and I have also all the information necessary.
And no, I don't mind to loose the warranty of my drive.

Thanks

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's extremely impractical. Even if you physically added the chips, and somehow got the firmware to use it, you'd open yourself up to all kinds of bugs, and little way to debug them. Also, depending on the application, increasing the cache size will likely give little benefit. If you need extreme performance, there are better ways.

There are all kinds of amazing, and amazingly impractical, projects taken up by very talented hackers. I suspect nobody has, and nobody will do anything like this.

And BTW, it's "Cache".

Though I would love to increase terribly the "Cash" of the Hard Disk. And I believe, it's not impractical anyhow..

Thank you for your replies.

English is not my first language, so cash or cache is the same to me, you know anyway what I'm talking about
But thank you for pointing it out bad spellings.

Today I'm using SCSI-160 with an Adaptec controller card with onboard memory. That gives some nice boost...
With two HDD (one for OS, one fore files) gives more speed
There are also controller cards for SATA with 512 MB memory.

There must be some performance increase with more cache on HDD. Hard to believe other wise.
Yes, there are other ways to give performance boost. Intel's new i7 (Hyper-thread) is soon in the stores. DDR-3 with 2000MHz clock etc...
But the PC-s slowest part is still the HDD and the SATA-3 interface is not fully used when the cache is small.

Seagate has a new HDD with 1.5 TB with just 32MB cache and slower data-transfer rate then the average SATA-3.

I have read some performance tests with different cache sizes but the performance was not impressing. But then again, those tests where made with 1-2-4 MB cache sizes

Bugs? No doubts.
So what else to do? I have tried to force the OS to use the memory (4GB) by disabling the Virtual Memory. The result was bugs, crashes and blue-screen. And as we know, Virtual Memory is on the HDD.

Would be interesting to see if someone has made this kind of an upgrade or just has some thoughts.
Even better if a HDD manufacturer would give some ides here

How about making a 1GB RAM Drive, and use that for the swap file? Then again, it all depends on what you're doing, and what specifically you want to speed up.

RAM Drive is a good idea. But not practicle for me.

I'm using large files ( 1-200MB) for testing scripts. RAM Drive would not help.
I also use WMVare for testing OS, on Linux host, and other programs. To set up a RAM Drive every time...
The official MS RAM Drive has limit of 32MB. Commercial software's may or may not be buggy. One more program to install and keep it in good condition.

The best is to use a controller with memory. But, if you use more then one HDD then the memory will be shared between the drives. Winn some, loose some....

So whats left? Increasing the cache it self... if possible...

Totally useless to have a large cache while the bottleneck is the bus. Faster drives have 10.000 or higher rotational speed (with all the mechanic part redesigned) different read channel and very different hw infrastructure. Also, if drive is used for STORAGE and not for repetitive r/w , cache is quite useless. It may improve some read-ahead, but it's not a copernican revolution. A optimized performance controller, maybe using PCI express instead of the old PCI (internal MoBo controllers use PCI) infrastructure may add something... Is it worth the price ?

BTW... I laugh everyday when people ask for performance : they change their drives with 10.000 RPM , 16 or 32M cache.... and they have a sempron cpu with 40$ motherboard and DDR400... like fitting a Porsche engine on a Chevrolet Matiz. O tempora, o mores !

good idea but you would also need to compile the firmware code to accept the new memory areas

I worked with hw support, so I know what you mean
My current drives has 10 or 15k rpm, I don't remember exactly, not that important with my Adaptec 128MB controller.
Resource demanding application. So some form of boost is a good to have.
May not be useful for an every day user who is only check their mail's, but those individuals was not on my mind.
But for 'private' individuals, like 'gamers' would also be a good news.
Think about web-, email- etc. servers

This is not an ad but take a look, so you see what I mean:
http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/C ... SAS-52445/

x8 PCI-E, 1.2GB/s. 512MB memory etc....
I will use 4 HDD so the memory will be 'shared'. But this is the best solution so far. Not the cheapest solution, but...

Yes, new firmware is probably needed. I'm not looking forward to this...
The reason why I'm asking around is that I don't really have time to make this or do this from scratch because I don't know much about HDD's. Somewhere in the future when I have some time off, I 'll try to figure this out if no one else made it or has some good proof if this would work or not and how and why.
I guess the only way to find out is to do it... But the last time I built something was when the PCI was still new.
So I'm a bit rusty

Why am I pushing this question? Let me blow this idea out of proportion...
Memories are getting cheaper. USB-memories has now 8GB... tomorrow 16-32-64GB?....
OS independent...
If it would be POSSIBLE to use 8GB cache , how much less 'reading' will be? Not a good news for the manufacturers! Longer lifetime?...
No need for controllers. Bad news for Adaptexxxx...
Taking advantage of the SATA-3 interface...

I can go on and on and on.....
Let me know if I'm wrong

I wrote about the new Intel i7 processor. Imagine, i7 Extreme Quadra Core...
That's 4 core with Hyper-Thread... 8 threads in one processor? Sounds nice But most of the time the processor will be idle. So why are we spending more and more money on a new processor when the real bottleneck now is the HDD?
Most of the people believes that those 3Gb/s is the read/write. Not to mention the difference between Gbit and GByte.
I heard this once: "Wow , 3Gb/s! I can copy a DVD in 2 sec!"

If you would have such a HDD, with a large cache, would it be 'useful' for you?

This is an interesting point, but you need to understand the function of Cache memory. It is used as a repository for 'probable' data. i.e. You want a file, so the hard disk reads in approx 32mb (some RAM is used for other purposes) and dumps it in the cache. The system reads your file, then sends for the next file. If this is in the cache, then whoopee!! The cache has a 'hit'. In a lot of situations there are more cache misses than hits as data is fragmented.

The RAM is also used for drive overhead and you will often find translator tables stored in RAM. As drives get bigger, then more RAM is needed to compensate for the larger tables. Putting a larger RAM chip MAY work, but the addressing will be contained in the Firmware which you would need to debug and reprogram.

if you want FASTER then why not go for RAID on SAS or FCal ?

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