HSM for Windows

[crowley666]

First, a little description of what I meant by HSM:

HSM usually means hierarchical storage management, and was originaly offered on IBM mainframes to move 'aged' data from fast storage(tier 1) into slow storage(tier 2,3,etc). Back then, it meant from disk arrays to type.


Does anybody know of a similar, free, software but for windows? Here's my reason for the question. I have a small SSD pool (tier 1) and a bunch of HD space (tier 2, 3, 4, etc). While I can install some stuff on my tier 2 disks, it becomes very cumbersome to maintain that setup manually, an in some cases it's impossible.

Ideally I would be able to install everything on my tier 1 disk (the SSD device) and it would migrate files that are not used much to the tier 2. Here's an example of something that HSM could do for you: all those windows files that aren't used much can be migrated off, all those steam games that we all insist in keeping stored but are never played can be migrated off, all those programs that we never use can be migrated off. The beauty of this system is that you keep the steam executables for the games that you use, and this is all handled transparently.

tl;dr : Does anybody know of a free HSM (a tool that provides tiered storage transparency)tool for Windows?

 

[aitoribarra]

I'm pretty sure that there was something like that in Windows Server NT4 or 2000, but it got removed, and was for disk -> to tape so no good for you.

You'd need something that sits on top of NTFS and replaces files that get moved with hard links, and keeps a database of all files and their last access dates and access frequency, so that it could decide when to move stuff between the tiers. I don't know of anything that can do that, but you could maybe get a similar benefit by using an Adaptec RAID card with MaxIQ or an LSI RAID card with CacheCade, both of which use an SSD or pool of SSDs to cache reads of your hot data. All writes will still go to HD, but reads will be from SSD and only hit HD if the data requested isn't in cache. But none of this is free!