Advanced Hard Drive Caching Techniques

Petros Koutoupis at Linux Journal posted detailed information regarding hard drive caching techniques. Users of traditional hard drives who’ve been considering a switch to a solid state drive (SSD) should find this particularly interesting. Petros describes,

Even today, the consumer SSD cannot compare to the capacities provided by the magnetic hard disk drive (or HDD), which is why in this article I intend to introduce readers to proven methods for obtaining near SSD performance with the traditional HDD. Multiple open-source projects exist that can achieve this, all but one of which utilizes an SSD as a caching node, and the other caches to RAM. The device drivers I cover here are dm-cache, FlashCache and the RapidDisk/RapidCache suite; I also briefly discuss bcache and EnhanceIO.