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I've got a set of large 7200 RPM drives, and a solid state disk. I'd like to use Windows' HSM system to use the SSD as much as possible, and offload things to the larger drives automatically when required.

Is this possible?

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Can you describe the real goal and give a more specific example, it's unclear what you exactly mean by that. In "I want to do X to achieve Y" you only specify X which is "HSM and offloading when required", but it is unclear to me what you want to achieve with that... – Tom Wijsman Apr 5 '11 at 14:17
Tom: HSM is a system for multiplexing a fast storage source and a slow one together. Data is put on the fastest data source available whenever it is being requested by applications, and is offloaded to a slower, larger datasource as required to make space on the faster datasource. In this case, the SSD would be the faster source, and the HDD would be the slower one. – Billy ONeal Apr 5 '11 at 14:20
@Tom: Basically the SSD is used as a HDD cache, except unlike a cache (which would need to keep the slower data source consistent), the "cache" is the master copy of the data which it's currently storing. – Billy ONeal Apr 5 '11 at 14:24
Yes, I think I understand the goal enough: The things that are currently being processed are more likely on the SSD and the things that are stored (and might be processed again in the future) are more likely on the HDD, the swapping occurs automatically without user intervention. I've removed the assumption part of my answer... – Tom Wijsman Apr 5 '11 at 14:30
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HSM is only available on Windows Server editions, see the reference Wikipedia - HSM which lists that and a lot of other implementations where you might find something useful.

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Unfortunately, those other implementations are many thousands of dollars :( (For that I could just buy a bleepload of SSDs) – Billy ONeal Apr 5 '11 at 14:32
@BillyONeal: Probably, people write sophisticated drivers in order to reach that effect. The best thing I could suggest to you is to try to port HSM from the Server edition or to use a Server edition. Good luck... :) – Tom Wijsman Apr 5 '11 at 14:42
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