Partioned SSD/Cache

[spdgt87501]

I have a really odd question, but its something somebody suggested. I just bought a Sony Vaio T Series Ultra-book. It came with a 500GB traditional hard drive and a 32 gigabyte cache. This person suggested I replace the cache with a partitioned 128gd SSD with 64gb as a cache for the traditional drive and 64 gb as regular SSD to put the operating system and frequently played games on.

My questions are:

1.) Is this even possible?
2.) If possible will this actually run any faster than with just the regular 32gb cache?

I apologize if this is a dumb question, but I was curious.

 

[Gundy]

I don't think this is possible. What I believe your laptop has is a hybrid hard drive, which combines a traditional spinning platter with a small SSD in a single package with a single drive controller. This means that Windows only sees a single drive, because the SSD portion of the drive is completely hidden behind the drive controller.

The drive controller intelligently uses the SSD memory to enhance performance: when you save a file, it is first written to the SSD memory, then gradually transferred to the spinning platter memory when the drive controller considers it appropriate. When you read a file, the drive controller will cache it in case you need to access it again soon.

What most of these drive controllers will do is figure out what files are used regularly and cache those. So all your startup files will probably end up stored in the SSD memory, giving you SSD-like startup times. You probably won't see too much benefit from going all-SSD in everyday computing (or even gaming) tasks.

 

[spdgt87501]

I don't think this is possible. What I believe your laptop has is a hybrid hard drive, which combines a traditional spinning platter with a small SSD in a single package with a single drive controller. This means that Windows only sees a single drive, because the SSD portion of the drive is completely hidden behind the drive controller.

The drive controller intelligently uses the SSD memory to enhance performance: when you save a file, it is first written to the SSD memory, then gradually transferred to the spinning platter memory when the drive controller considers it appropriate. When you read a file, the drive controller will cache it in case you need to access it again soon.

What most of these drive controllers will do is figure out what files are used regularly and cache those. So all your startup files will probably end up stored in the SSD memory, giving you SSD-like startup times. You probably won't see too much benefit from going all-SSD in everyday computing (or even gaming) tasks.

I thought that was probably the case. The suggestion made me curious because I do play a game and plan on buying another (sim city4 and sim city(release 2013 version)) that has alot of individual frequently loaded files. However I kind of figured alot of these frequently loaded files and the start up data for the OS would end up on the cache, negating any possible benefits of the proposed idea.

If anyone else has any thoughts I would appreciate the input, so far it looks like a bad/not possible idea.