The folks at NVELO recently provided The SSD Guy with some benchmark data comparing their Dataplex software’s performance against the Intel iSRT caching software that is becoming prevalent among Ultrabooks.
For those unaware of these two technologies, they are both caching software that automatically maintains “Hot” data within a low-capacity SSD while leaving “Cold” data on the system HDD. The end result is that the PC performs as if it boasts a large SSD when, in truth, it uses a standard HDD and a modest-sized SSD, giving SSD-like performance at HDD-like prices, with full HDD capacity.
The chart in this post, provided by NVELO, illustrates a few standard benchmarks run on three systems: a standard off-the-shelf HP Envy 4-103 Ultrabook* using the iSRT-based write-back cache that it ships with (gray columns), the same system but adapted to use a write-around (i.e. slow) implementation of NVELO’s Dataplex (pale blue), and the same system with Dataplex running in write-back (i.e. fast) mode (darker blue).
Interestingly enough, the Dataplex write-around mode keeps pace with the write-back implementation of iSRT, outperforming it to some degree in five of the eight benchmarks. However, Dataplex in write-back mode consistently outperforms iSRT in write-back mode, by anywhere from 21-141%, averaging 57% over all the benchmarks.
NVELO Dataplex is now available from a number of SSD suppliers: Corsair, Crucial, Edge Technology, Mushkin, and OCZ. There’s a free-download white paper that covers this software on the Objective Analysis home page.
* HP Envy 4-1030 Ultrabook
- Processor: Intel Core i5-3317U @r 1.70GHz, up to 2.60GHz
- Memory: 4GB 1600MHz DDR3
- Cache SSD: 32GB Samsung PM830
- HDD: 500GB Hitachi Z5K500-500 7mm 2.5″ 5400
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000
- OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
3 thoughts on “PC Caching Software is Not All the Same”
Comments are closed.