Solve SSD woes with giant write behind cache

swaaye

Entirely Suboptimal
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http://flashfire.org/xe/

Somebody decided to take the bull by the horns and solve SSD-write-caused system pauses/delays by whipping up a in-between driver that caches writes way more aggressively than MS does.

I put this on my EeePC 900 and it made a tremendous difference in responsiveness. That is, unless I cause too many writes in a short period of time and overfill the cache at which point it will pause again. It really does give a huge improvement though.
 
That's the thing about caches - everything is all fine and dandy until you fill the cache, and then you are back to the original problem, with the addition of the cache handling. Ideally, you tune your cache size based on your usage/application, but in the real world you try to make it "good enough" for most of the time, and live with the slowdown on the occasions when you flood the cache.
 
It gets worse if you crash or lose power. With that giant write behind cache, you're almost certainly going to lose data or corrupt something.

Especially if it's violating write-through and/or ignoring flushes that the file system is depending on to guarantee integrity.
 
I used this program (When it was called Flashpoint beta 5) with Windows 7 on Aspire One A110. That machine has a horribly slow SSD. Flashpoint made a huge difference from waiting 5s for a tab to open in Firefox to almost desktop-like speed. Of course reliability might be an issue.
 
Isn't this similar to what virtual machines do?

I wonder if there's anything similar to Linux...
 
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