Lenovo RapidDrive Technology
When I first wrote about SSD technology on this blog about 2 years ago, I mentioned that we could expect to see hybrid SSD/HDD implementations in notebooks where you could use fast SSD flash memory for commonly accessed files and spinning drives for bulk storage.
With our just announced Lenovo IdeaPad Y460 and Y560 notebooks, our engineers are finally making this hybrid storage a reality.
I am experimenting with hybrid storage right now on a ThinkStation S20. I have a 256GB SSD as my boot disk (c:\). I have installed Win7 plus all of my programs here. As my D:\, I have attached a 300GB 10,000 rpm Western Digital Velociraptor in which I put my swap file, documents, pictures, and the like. Then I have yet a third 750GB 7200 rpm disk for everything else.
I suspect that hybrid storage has not been implemented yet by the industry for multiple reasons. One, though falling in price, flash memory continues to be extremely expensive. Second, flash drives still are not big enough. Given my choice I would have a single 2TB flash disk that would hold everything. Since that doesn’t exist, I am forced to make conscious decisions on a regular basis. Do I install a program/file to my fast but relatively small SSD, or do I put it on one of my spinning drives instead? Which one?
As a relatively sophisticated user, I am trading off hassle for speed. These decisions are easy for me, but the average user has no idea about C:\ vs. D:\ or spinning vs. SSD. They might be aware that their SSD is faster, but don’t have the slightest clue about how to manage a dual drive setup. They just want their PC to work. Enter Lenovo’s RapidDrive technology.
When you buy a Lenovo Y560 or Y460, you will have the option to configure it with RapidDrive. Your machine will have your standard hard disk drive plus a 32GB or 64GB SSD installed in the internal PCI-E slot. The breakthrough is not combining the two in one system. Anyone can do that. The breakthrough is using a Lenovo patent-pending technology that connects both the SSD and HDD simultaneously as one big, contiguous drive. Unlike my setup above, this storage is dynamically pooled and managed. The end user does not need to do anything. The system manages the SSD depending on usage. Programs, documents, and other files are dynamically moved on and off of the SSD so that you can always get the fastest speed possible. This also means that the system will not return an error if the SSD is already at full capacity. The program/file will automatically be installed on the HDD and moved to the SSD later in the background if the algorithm determines that is optimal.
This is not Intel TurboMemory. TurboMemory required more user intervention to manage on a regular basis. Our technology not only offers more capacity, but is more automatic.
Here is a brief video demonstrating the technology in action. Pictured are two Y560 systems. The one of the left has RapidDrive. The one on the right has just a standard HDD. Otherwise, both are identically configured. A simple script shows loading a series of programs and how much extra speed the RapidDrive can provide. The RapidDrive finishes in about 13 seconds. The non-RapidDrive system takes almost 30 seconds.
Lenovo Meet the Modder Dean Liou
Lenovo Meet the modder- Chris Blarsky Dairy 2
Lenovo Meet the modder- Chris Blarsky Dairy 1
Lenovo H320 desktop
January 8th, 2010 1:45 am
wow, it’s so cool!
Would it aslo be implemented on thinkpads?
January 8th, 2010 2:32 am
Is this is managed by a Windows device driver (ie something you need at install time and only works under whatever Windows versions you have chosen to support) or is it done in the drive controller (ie would work under any operating system, no need to have drivers installed)?
January 8th, 2010 3:11 am
I’m seeing a lot of interesting technologies come out of Lenovo in the past few days. Amazingly, the two most creative technologies are definitely on the IdeaPad line (this and the U1 hybrid).
Hybrid storage is definitely something I wanted to do on my x200 Tablet several months ago (using either an ExpressCard or PCI-Express based SSD). However, this was not possible at the time due to BIOS limitations. I ended up going to a 64GB SSD only and using my 2TB+ desktop for my bulk media storage.
I am curious as to exactly how this works. If it truly is seamless (and well managed) this sounds like a great idea for the more novice user. I still prefer full control, but for many I can see this as a great feature.
Any though on how long till we see mini PCI-E based SSDs as an option on ThinkPads? I’m most interested for the X series as the single spindle design tends to leave you with limited storage if you opt for an SSD.
January 8th, 2010 3:54 am
Dear Matt, thanks for the post!
I would like to say ‘finally’ as i’m waiting for such an option on my Thinkpad since SSDs were introduced (see my comments to your SSD post). Currently i’m fine with a 256GB SSD for my Thinkpad, but i refrain from stuffing it with music and films though.
+1 for Roger’s Question on other OSes (did i mention, i only like a Thinkpad that runs Linux? ;o) )
+1 for jonlumpkin’s question on the introduction to Thinkpads. I would already be fine with the option of a mini PCI-E SSD, thus leaving the bay for the optical drive.
and also +1 on the question when the effort of innovating will be invested advancing Thinkpads rather than IdeaPads.
cheers
Hecke
January 8th, 2010 4:05 am
So the SSD is used as a cache, transparently? Is the data deleted from the HDD when added to the SSD?
January 8th, 2010 4:28 am
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January 8th, 2010 7:12 am
Matt the RapidDrive technology sounds pretty interesting and reminds me somehow to load balancing techniques…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.....computing)
…and the like. It’s not an easy task to implement such algorithms in a well behaving and foolproof manner, especially for common persistent storage devices.
I think it would be nice to be also used together with ExpressCard/PCI-Express based SSDs on notebooks which don’t offer enough internal space for two drives. – Let’s hope we soon will have the chance to see and tryout RapidDrive in practice on several Lenovo products.
January 8th, 2010 10:45 am
BRAVO. This is the kind of innovation I really appreciate in Windows Home Server, and the kind of management-free innovation that Apple prides itself in.
January 8th, 2010 11:05 am
Interesting that Lenovo chose the consumer market for this, over the business Thinkpad crowd.
January 8th, 2010 11:25 am
This is just HSM.
While I think it’s nice that it’s coming to the workstation, there’s nothing you can reasonably patent here.
January 8th, 2010 4:45 pm
I hate to bring this up, but what happens in the event of drive failure? When one drive fails, is the data lost on both drives or can the data on the healthy drive be recovered? This sounds a little like an intelligent JBOD system which is pretty neat. Of course, even if RapidDrive does ‘the right thing’, it’s no excuse for not keeping backups.
January 8th, 2010 6:14 pm
ThinkPad support may be announced in the future, but for now it is an Idea feature. Since it uses the mini PCIe slot, many of those slots today are taken up by other wireless communication radios on the ThinkPad series. It could be done though if we chose to.
Implementing this does require a driver. Otherwise the SSD shows up as one drive and the HDD shows up as a 2nd drive. The driver unifies them and allocates/manages space.
The data is designed to be either or. Duplicating data on both is not in the design of the driver. If you kept the two separate and added an intelligent RAID driver which could handle drives of different sizes and types and/or set up some auto sync capability, yeah, you could do it. But again, we’re designing this to be a performance enhancer, not an internal backup.
January 8th, 2010 8:35 pm
>>>This is not Intel TurboMemory
Intel Turbo Memory is just a specific implementation of solid state storage. It is operation system support that make it work.
How the RapidDrive is different from MS ReadyBoost or ReadyDrive ?
January 11th, 2010 11:56 pm
Right, I understand that this is not RAID or some other type of mirroring, striping or other backup scheme. My question is how fault-tolerant is RapidDrive?
For example, in some JBOD configurations if one physical drive fails, data on the entire logical volume becomes unavailable. In other JBOD configurations, the logical volume can be repaired and only the data on failed physical drive is lost.
For sake of the argument, let us assume that the fast SSD physical drive fails for some reason. Will the data remaining on the spinning disk still be accessible, say in another computer, or since part of the logical volume failed has the rest of the logical volume failed with it?
I am also curious if Linux users will be able to take advantage of this. I am going to assume not, since this is probably a operating system level feature rather than BIOS or hardware level. Though I hope I’m wrong.
January 12th, 2010 5:48 pm
Looks like this would double your chance of a hard disk failure…
January 12th, 2010 11:00 pm
[...] – Lenovo Blog: Lenovo RapidDrive Technology – PCWorld: Nexus One Has $174.15 Worth of Hardware – TechinLobang: Summing Up Google Chrome OS [...]
January 14th, 2010 4:55 am
Lenovo RapidDrive is an amazing innovation.
It has combined PCI-e SSD and normal HDD.
High performance SSD for OS and software.
High capacity HDD for data,music and movie.
Blanance cost and performance!
Also,Lenovo design two disk recovery technology.
It means that customers can store data inside SSD into HDD hide partition.
If SSD has been broken,customers can get data back from HDD.
It is real different from Intel Turbo/Cache technology.
RapidDrive SSD is a real storage to store OS and software.
Intel Turbo/Cache is just a cache function and only can speedup systems while you can not store anything into it.Performance is very limitation.
January 20th, 2010 7:06 pm
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January 21st, 2010 9:01 am
Props to Lenovo for a great invention!
Why should the user do what the computer was invented to do: compute.
By the way, what would the price of a RapidDrive be?
And is it user-replacable?
Will you license the technology to other companies?
And do you want to see a third-party (Seagate) infrastructure selling these drives in the market?
Also, since IBM sold off the drive division to Hitachi, who’s going to make these?
January 21st, 2010 1:47 pm
[...] Lenovo Blog featured the following YouTube video showing a laptop with RapidDrive finishing a script in 13 [...]
January 31st, 2010 11:58 am
This sounds great, y460 looking like my next laptop….
The way this is explained, sounds more like UnionFS (from Linux) than prior Intel efforts to integrate SSD into the Windows environment. I have been wanting this for a couple of years now, sounds like it is about to be real.
Anyone know of a technical document that gives the details of how this works There are probably ways to make it even better, such as reverse mapping of the actual RAM into a flash-based backing store (ie, you would have something like 4 to 8 GB real ram, then the flash is a dedicated hardware swap store, so that to the processor it looks like the system has 32GB or 64GB of RAM)
February 2nd, 2010 9:32 pm
[...] are the visible results of this RapidDrive Technology, taken from the Lenovo Blogs - Inside the Box. Pictured are two Y560 systems. The one of the left has RapidDrive. The one on the right has a [...]
February 3rd, 2010 12:02 am
[...] are the visible results of this RapidDrive Technology, taken from the Lenovo Blogs - Inside the Box. Pictured are two Y560 systems. The one of the left has RapidDrive. The one on the right has a [...]
February 23rd, 2010 2:58 pm
It’s unfortunate that it won’t be available in ThinkPads, where one would presume most users need the boost in performance (esp. the W-series, which is what I’m getting). I’m planning to run a lot of VMs, with virtual HDs (where the files are anywhere from 20GB+). I wonder if this technology was designed for that situation.
I also wonder about whether or not there is an increase in the number of read/writes, and what that does to the lifespan of the SSD.
March 4th, 2010 3:34 pm
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March 17th, 2010 4:31 pm
I want to do this with my Lenovo S10-3T. It does have a PCI-E slot so you could have a SSD attached to that and use the SATA port for the big hard drive. I think that you could do the same using software to manage recently used files by moving them to the SSD to make them load faster.
This gives me an idea!