![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
klingonscum
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2004
- Messages
- 133
Situation - I'm in the middle of changing jobs, with a "gap" in the middle between them so I'm having to really not spend money for a couple of months until the first few paychecks fill the "gap"...I'm sure we've all been there at some point. So naturally, since the timing was perfect, my wife's HDD decided to crash a few days ago. What's really fun - this is the system we have Quicken and Quickbooks on and we're prepping our stuff to go to the CPA for tax season.
Her's is an older system - a Phenom II 550BE on a Gigabyte 760 (I think) Mobo. She has a 60GB SSD boot drive and the HDD that crashed was a 2TB Seagate (which was less than 2 years old...I think I'm done with Seagate at this point since lately I've had several go down and hose me repeatedly). Fortunately, I keep regular backups (which unfortunately I was a little behind on) so we only lost about 2 months of stuff, but I have to get her machine back up and running, and I had a 1TB Western Digital Blue drive lying around.
But...once bitten twice shy. That SSD is getting long in the tooth itself; it's got to be at least 4-5 years old at this point. What I'd like to do is set up a "live mirror" partition on part of the new HDD - I'm not going to try doing RAID 1 through the motherboard (a Windows reinstall at this point is out of the question so whatever I do has to work on the in place system) but a Windows Mirror Array is a very distinct and painless alternative.
But of course the problem with that is it slows the speed of the system down to the HDD's speed as the SSD will constantly be waiting on it to finish writes. What would be a better alternative would be Intel's Z68 based SSD Read only drive caching - I've used that on another system and had the SSD crash on me and I didn't lose a beat. But this is obviously NOT an Intel system.
So, there's the problem in a nutshell - setting up Windows drive array mirroring will solve my reliability concerns by giving me a live copy, but I'll be sacrificing the SSD's speed to do that, but SSD read caching WOULD solve the problem - except I don't have the hardware to support it (and all the software solutions I've seen out there are OEMs) - and since I'm broke for the next couple months, just getting a caching hard drive solution is out of the question as well. My question is therefore - are there any read caching software based shareware/freeware SSD to HDD solutions? I had hopes for VeloSSD (as it's only about $10, I think I could manage that
), but from what I can tell, it does writeback caching which wouldn't solve my security/reliability issue.
From my googling, I'd suspect I'm just SOL, but thought I'd ask the HardOCP crowd anyway...
Her's is an older system - a Phenom II 550BE on a Gigabyte 760 (I think) Mobo. She has a 60GB SSD boot drive and the HDD that crashed was a 2TB Seagate (which was less than 2 years old...I think I'm done with Seagate at this point since lately I've had several go down and hose me repeatedly). Fortunately, I keep regular backups (which unfortunately I was a little behind on) so we only lost about 2 months of stuff, but I have to get her machine back up and running, and I had a 1TB Western Digital Blue drive lying around.
But...once bitten twice shy. That SSD is getting long in the tooth itself; it's got to be at least 4-5 years old at this point. What I'd like to do is set up a "live mirror" partition on part of the new HDD - I'm not going to try doing RAID 1 through the motherboard (a Windows reinstall at this point is out of the question so whatever I do has to work on the in place system) but a Windows Mirror Array is a very distinct and painless alternative.
But of course the problem with that is it slows the speed of the system down to the HDD's speed as the SSD will constantly be waiting on it to finish writes. What would be a better alternative would be Intel's Z68 based SSD Read only drive caching - I've used that on another system and had the SSD crash on me and I didn't lose a beat. But this is obviously NOT an Intel system.
So, there's the problem in a nutshell - setting up Windows drive array mirroring will solve my reliability concerns by giving me a live copy, but I'll be sacrificing the SSD's speed to do that, but SSD read caching WOULD solve the problem - except I don't have the hardware to support it (and all the software solutions I've seen out there are OEMs) - and since I'm broke for the next couple months, just getting a caching hard drive solution is out of the question as well. My question is therefore - are there any read caching software based shareware/freeware SSD to HDD solutions? I had hopes for VeloSSD (as it's only about $10, I think I could manage that
), but from what I can tell, it does writeback caching which wouldn't solve my security/reliability issue.From my googling, I'd suspect I'm just SOL, but thought I'd ask the HardOCP crowd anyway...