If I have an SSD and a hard disk in a system, can the SSD act as cache for the hard disk?

Question

Say I have some partitions; one on a SATA drive and one on an SSD. I want to create a "virtual" hybrid disk. Is this possible?

Answer 1

bchache might be what you are looking for. It can act as write through or write back cache.

ZFS and Btrfs also have features to put more often used blocks on flash storage.

Answer 2

There is flashcache. It is used by Facebook to accelerate DB-storage systems.

I haven't tried it yet, so your mileage may vary.

Answer 3

If you have a set of files for which you need low latency, you can establish a RAID-1 volume that mirrors the SSD content on a hard disk. Declare the hard disk component as “write-mostly”, so that the SSD will be favored when reading. For example, if sda is your SSD and sdb is your hard disk, create a partition sda1 that covers the whole drive, create a partition sdb1 of the same size, and create a RAID volume with

mdadm --create -l 1 -n 2 /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 --write-mostly /dev/sdb1

Answer 4

Since Linux 3.9 dm-cache has been merged into the mainline tree. As per the documentation, it's specifically designed for this purpose.

It aims to improve performance of a block device (eg, a spindle) by dynamically migrating some of its data to a faster, smaller device (eg, an SSD).

It will also provide write caching to some extend:

If writeback, the default, is selected then a write to a block that is cached will go only to the cache and the block will be marked dirty in the metadata.

About the virtual hybrid disk you'd like to see:

This device-mapper solution allows us to insert this caching at different levels of the dm stack, for instance above the data device for a thin-provisioning pool.

In other words, the dm-stack lets you use any block device/partition to become a single cached virtual disk as a storage device, just like a /dev/md0 in a software raid set.