Serious Upgrades

PCI Express Flash Drive

Years ago when I originally conceived Gemini my plan was to use one of the FusionIO devices for my main boot and system drive. While FusionIO kept promising they would release a bootable device, after a couple of years they finally gave up promising and declared that none of their customers really had a need for such a device.

While OCZ has had a similar device for some time that is bootable, when I studied how it operated it never sounded right.

Recently Intel released its Ramsdale series under the Intel 910 product line, and it seemed to be what I was waiting for so I ordered the 800 GB model for $4,000. It was easy enough to install in my computer, but when I finally got it working it appeared as four 200 GB devices. Try as I might, I could find no way to install and operating system on it either.

Finally I started searching the web again for more information and found a few good reviews the pointed out it indeed was not bootable, and it indeed looked like 4 separated devices, with no built-in RAID management. What is surprising is that while each review made these facts clear as day and easy to find, none of the Intel documentation makes any of that clear.

It was easy enough to configure the 4 devices into a single 800 GB Software RAID 0 drive using Windows, but still you cannot boot from a Software RAID. Also, what was really odd according to some of the reviews, the device does not perform any better in RAID 0 operation than in direct operation. Now that is really strange. I wonder how Intel screwed that up?

One good thing is that the new device is pretty fast. Using VMWare Workstation 8 I created a Virtual Disk on the Flash Drive and installed Windows 8. It only takes 11 seconds for Windows 8 to boot from a cold start. By comparison, using a RAM Disk to host the Virtual Disk, I can get Windows 8 to boot in 9 seconds.

Real RAID

I have had so many problems with the built-in RAID on my Intel S5520SC system board that I decided to go buy a high end PCI Express RAID Controller - the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9266-8i.

I also got the Flash backup option. Basically this is a daughter card with Flash memory and a bank of capacitors. The controller has a huge 1 GB RAM cache to improve performance, but if the power fails your file system can be royally hosed. With the flash backup, the capacitors provide power to the controller long enough to copy the RAM cache to flash. When the power comes back, the RAM cache is restored from flash and all the outstanding I/O operations can be completed so that your file system stays sane.

Hierarchical Storage Management

In order to make better use of the Intel 910 more conveniently I decided to experiment with and HSM system called MoonWalk. The idea is that I create a 'source' directory on the RAID 0 Flash Drive and a 'destination' directory on the slower RAID 5 Disk file system. The HSM software will automatically migrate files from the source directory to the destination directory, and leave behind empty stub files in the source directory. If any program tries to access the stub files in the source directory, the HSM software will automatically de-migrate the files back from the destination.

In effect, you can pretend that your source directory is a lot bigger than it really is because files that are not used frequently are migrated to the slower, larger, less expensive disk array. It is convenient because when you want to access the files in the source directory again, they are automatically restored.

Thumb Drive Boot

I was finally able to do something I have wanted for years - boot Windows directly from a USB Thumb Drive. For a long time it was possible to boot Windows PE or Windows RE from a Thumb Drive for installing and/or repairing Windows, but I could never figure out how to actually install the full Windows O/S on the Thumb Drive and boot it, until recently. Finally I found a great article on how to do this with Windows 8 and I was able to get it working.

The great thing about this is that in an emergency, if I have a disk system failure, or if I just want to do maintenance, I can boot the full version of Windows with full functionality from the Thumb Drive.