Adding an M.2 for SSD Caching My Storage Drive

[benser]

Hey guys,

I'm wondering if I'm going to see any sort of improvement to my PCs performance (primarily for gaming) if I add an M.2 SSD to cache my mechanical storage drive?

Mobo: Asus Maximus IX Hero Z270
CPU: i7-7700k
GFX: 2x GTX 1080ti

Storage:
Memory: 32GB DDR4 @ 3000mhz
SSD with Win10 installed: 120GB 840 Evo
Storage Drive with most games on: WD Caviar Black 1TB WD1003FZEX

Can I add an M.2 and raid it with the storage drive and see any performance increase thanks to RST?

 

[atljsf]

if you already have a ssd with the os, no, games will not have much benefit fro the m.2

you will have to move games to it and set steam or any other game to use it and perhaps some games will load aster but not much difference will be found , unless your hard disk is really slow

the m.2 is ideal for windows and programs, apps, the ssd or the hard disk for the games

remember to avoid filling the ssd, that does make it slow, leave at least 10% of it free

 

[rhysiam]

You can allocate up to 60GB from a totally empty SSD to accelerate your HDD via Intel RST. That should work at least as well as any hybrid drive (sometimes called SSHD).

How often and by how much that actually improves game load times would be hard to generalise, because it's going to depend hugely on what you do. RST will not improve read speeds the first time you load data, so the only time it's going to be helpful is if you're re-accessing the same data multiple times. Sometimes that can happen if you die and have to re-load an area, or travel back-and-forth between areas and re-load the same assets. But you already have 32GB of RAM which is going to cache a bunch of stuff anyway. If you played a specific game, rebooted your computer (which clears the RAM), and reloaded the same game I suspect it would be much quicker with RST. There would certainly be edge cases like that where you measure real gains from the RST cache. But how widespread the gains would be? It's difficult to say with confidence. My guess is outside of edge cases like restarting your computer and firing up the same game, the gains would be pretty minimal.