Solid State Drives

Hi,

in the FAQ there is the question "Does Returnil Virtual System 2010 support Solid State Drives?"

As I have a SSD, what does this answer mean "...but does not yet support disk write minimization."? What is disk write minimization?

 

Hi cruchot and welcome to the forums

Solid State Drives are based on a similar technology to USB sticks. Flash based media has a physical limitation on the number of times you can write to a specific sector of the disk which is about 100,000 times (very loose rule of thumb as some are better, some may not be as good).

In the Labs version (now released to public beta testing as Returnil Virtual System Lite 2011) we have been testing for well over a year now, we have included multi-disk virtualization. This means that it is capable of protecting non-system disks and partitions as RVS has always done for the System Partition.

As there is a limit on the number of writes as described above, the new RVS Lite version allows you to create and store the virtualization cache for non-system disks on a different disk to minimize the number of writes to that disk. As the virtualization cache will use the same sectors of the disk over and over, you can see why this may be a problem for the SSD over time.

When the cache is moved to an alternate, sacrificial disk (an older platter drive is a good choice as it does not have the same limitations on writes), the instances where something needs to be saved (written) to the disk is minimized to only what needs to be saved there "permanently". This then works to extend the life of the SSD over time.

We are working to realize this for the System itself, but this is still in the future. Also, the virtualization engine upgrades in the Labs/Lite version will be integrated into the main RVS 2011+ product line with other capabilities we are testing in the 3.2 and later 3.3 generations which includes Multi-state restore support.

Mike

 

Hi Mike,

thanks for your response.