Short Stroking SLC-Cached SSDs

[xSOSxHawkens]

Bear in mind this is more a thought question than a reality one, and yes I know its silly.

So... Old school trick here, short stroking. For those too young, back in the days of the HDD you could choose to short storke it for better performance. The idea was that HDD are faster on the outer sections of the platters, so if you limited a partition space to the outer locations you could achieve substantial and noticable increses in speed so long as there was no cross talk off the partition space.

Now days, with SLC Cached SSD's we see a similar situation, where data stored in the SLC portion of the disk is signifigantly faster than that stored on the deeper layers of the NAND.

Is it possible to Short Stroke the SLC portion of the NAND as dedicated speed space at the expense of no longer having SLC caching on the rest of the space?

Would there be any benefit from doing so?

[_I_]

ssd has no stroke

all sectors of a ssd have the same response time no matter what the previous sector read was

[Lord Flashheart]

It would be useful if you could.
Maybe changing say 1TB QLC drive into a 256GB SLC caching drive.

[SeriousCCIE]

_I_ is correct. There is no short stoking an SSD.

If an SSD drive has an SLC cache or a DRAM buffer, those storage areas are not accessible directly and cannot be utilized as a means of 'short stoking'.

In the event you had a drive like one of those western digitals or seagates that marged an SSD drive with a hard drive and ended up with two volumes--the SSD and the HDD, you'd just have two volumes and you could short stoke the HDD but probably would be better off just getting something better since often those drives are 5400rpm due to expecting to use the SSD as a cache.

You might want to look at a product called Primocache for disk caching if you wanted to benefit using a faster storage type (say, DRAM or an SSD of *any* size, or an optane drive, in front of an HDD or other slower SSD).

I personally use it on my gaming PC as well as workstations and a server; it works great. I didn't even bother trying to short stoke the raids I had because with the SSD caching I was able to make use of the full volume space.

WIth the advent of inexpensive tiered storage mechanisms--be it via clever software or hardware integration, the days of short stoking a RAID or slower disk drive for performance is drawing to a close.

You may wish to leave aside unused space on a solid state drive to leave that capacity available for the error recovery/garbage collection purposes of solid state performance maintenance done via the drive's firmware (this can also increase the longevity of the drive), but generally speaking it doesn't speed up performance directly; it would help prevent performance from degrading over time, though.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Yeh, I already use primocahe on two of my rigs, and have for awhile as its one of the few good uses of 32GB of system ram for consumers.

This was more just a random thought question than anything.

[_I_]

better off using optane cache if the mobo suports it