It’s been a couple of weeks now since the latest version of AMD’s StoreMI software reached the mainstream.
STOREMI_2.0.0.0113 BETA (as it is officially called) extends support for AMD’s Ryzen/Threadripper family (but not Athlon or Epyc) but has yet to support some of the older AMD chipsets.
Biostar has been the first one to publish an official list of AMD motherboards that supports StoreMI. However most recent motherboards with AMD chipsets should be compatible regardless. The software is free and is particularly useful for DIYers looking to essentially put together a hybrid drive (SSD and HDD) with the SSD acting as a cache.
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MiDrive
There’s no limit to the capacity of either and you should be able to use either a SATA or a PCIe SSD without having to reinstall Windows. A new caching system allows you to mirror your data to the SSD for speedup, a great way of avoiding corrupting and losing your data if the SSD fails for whatever reason.
Gamers as well as creatives will be able to benefit from such a setup by pooling together available storage resources. The end product is virtual storage that is not as fast as a pure SSD but offers a far bigger capacity.
Tests carried out earlier this year showed that boot times went down by 31% and game load times decreased by 13% compared to an HDD only setup. It would be interesting to see how RAID-0 setups of smaller SSDs combined with large slow spinning hard disk drives perform.
For example, using two 128GB SSD in RAID-0, paired with one 8TB hard disk drive. Equally interesting would be to get a small but fast SSD combined with a slow but big SSD. Something like the MiDrive that Enmotus delivered earlier this year that combined SLC and QLC.
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