Recommend SSD for Caching purpose on Intel Powered PC

[prrathamesh]

Hello !
I have i5 5th gen processor .H85 based asus motherboard and 2TB Seagate hard drive. This is an gaming rig and I use IDE such as net beans android studio.

I live in India and buy items from site like amazon.in, flipkart.com, snapdeal.com

I am planning to buy a SSD for my computer. I have short listed 4 SSD as follows

ZOTAC Premium Edition 240GB SSD

Samsung 850 EVO 120GB 2.5-Inch SATA

Transcend SSD370S 128GB

Transcend (TS240GSSD220S) Information 240 GB TLC

I am planning to use Intel® Rapid Storage Technology for caching which has limit of 64GB but is available free of cost. Please suggest good caching softwares preferably free ones.

Please suggest me SSD which is good in price performance ratio for real world performance. i would like to keep the budget as low as possible but if extra money spent is worth thn won't mind spending few bucks extra.That is optimum performance for minimum money. cost per GB is not concern as i wont be using it as my boot drive.

Another question is if i keep the SSD for Intel RST what will happen for remaining storage will it be locked away or I can utilize that?
[strike]
Also will it be a good idea to put 2 cheap SSD transcend 370s in raid 0 config ? thn buying 1x 256gb samsung evo ? again data loss is not issue for me as i primarily need this for caching [/strike]

 

[USAFRet]

It would be MUCH better to put the OS and applications on the SSD, rather than use it as a cache for the 2TB HDD.

 

[prrathamesh]

Thank you for your quick response !

Yes I get it but my programs size is over 200gigs so SSD wont be sufficient for me in terms of storage capacity. i know we can move folders like pictures documents etc to hard drive but what about program files ?

please suggest about the raid 0 config as well(last line added in main question)

 

[USAFRet]

Thank you for your quick response !

Yes I get it but my programs size is over 200gigs so SSD wont be sufficient for me in terms of storage capacity. i know we can move folders like pictures documents etc to hard drive but what about program files ?

please suggest about the raid 0 config as well(last line added in main question)

200GB of actual applications?
All of those do not need to live on the SSD. You can install them where you choose.

The IRST only gives you 64GB of SSD. So all the other files and programs still run off the HDD. No speed benefit at all.


RAID 0 + SSD? No, don't do that.
Read this all the way through:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

 

[Karadjgne]

You put the program on the HDD. You use the ssd for OS and other relevant programs like flashplayer, Adobe, office etc.

What happens is the first time you open that big program, any relevant data gets put in a temp file on the SSD. So you'll actually run the program at SSDs speeds but store it on the HDD instead. Works like a cache drive, but doesn't require the Intel RST nor have the RST limitations. RST works best on small SSDs like 16Gb or less, where the OS is on HDD.

I run a 128Gb Samsung 840 Pro, and @79Gb out of 119Gb is nothing more than OS, the extras and a few games. Everything else is on the HDD which honestly doesn't affect times at all.

 

[photonboy]

My advice:

250GB SSD:
Windows OS, apps, and a few games that run much better on SSD (like Skyrim due to frequent load points).

HDD:
A second Steam folder for games, backup IMAGE of SSD, other media, downloads etc.

 

[prrathamesh]

thank you everyone for your inputs.

Okay I get it so 250Gbs SSD would be better option. I usually play one game at a time and been playing witcher 3 since may 2015. actually I came across one article where it was benchmarked that cached ssd is as good as boot ssd. thus i thought to give caching a try without much hassle. so is
ZOTAC Premium Edition 240GB SSD a good choice?

 

[geofelt]

You are making a mistake if you do not use a ssd first for the windows "C" drive. 120gb may be too small for that.

Past that, a cache is generally not a very good performer.
You need to be able to hold most of what you need in the cache for it to do any good.

Then, there are differences in ssd devices. Samsung evo and Intel are the best.

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

Here is a study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html
Spoiler... no benefit at all.

 

[prrathamesh]

http://www.hardcoreware.net/ssd-cache-performance/

hello friends I was talking about above review. Is it legit ?

 

[USAFRet]

http://www.hardcoreware.net/ssd-cache-performance/

hello friends I was talking about above review. Is it legit ?

4 years ago, it may have been relevant.
"After looking at our test results, I think it’s pretty clear that if you only want to spend around $50-100 on an SSD, caching is the way to go. "

"Get yourself an SSD – anything from a 32GB to a 128GB, and make use of caching today. You will never want to go back to a mechanical drive."

For that same price today, you get a 250 or 500GB drive, and just put the whole OS and application stack on it.
No contest.

 

[prrathamesh]

please give your input on zoatc SSD that I have listed.

I have compared available SSDs on http://ssd.userbenchmark.com. Samsung is the best but very premium for the performance it offer's so would choose 128Gb only as last option. Intel ssd's are super premium in India costs sometimes twice for the same capacity as compared to other brands

inputs as in reliability and performance of drive.

 

[prrathamesh]

I ahve made my mind would opt an Samsung Evo 850 250Gb SSD. Thank you everyone ! Have a Great day !

 

[photonboy]

I ahve made my mind would opt an Samsung Evo 850 250Gb SSD. Thank you everyone ! Have a Great day !

1) Good, reliable SSD.

2) Make sure to Install Samsung Magician and:
a) apply Overprovision as suggested
b) Windows optimization (read all the options... it gets confusing because "reliability" seems to disable the System Restore option so that means less writes to the SSD so it should wear out slower.. however, the SYSTEM reliability is much improved by using System Restore in case you need to roll back due to an issue).

WEARING OUT is not an issue.

So set whatever option you want like "Maximum Performance" but I suggest enabling System Restore, and possibly Hibernation if you care about start time (I don't use it since it allocates most of the system memory size. It did use about 10GB since I have 16GB of system memory; when I had 8GB it uses 7GB at one point).

Coming out of Hibernation is handy, especially if the main drive is a slower HDD.

BOOT TIME will also increase as you add more programs so Hibernation might make more sense several months from now. My boot time went from about 30 seconds to 60 seconds, though I did manually change a few programs to NOT start up right away. (I suggest having STEAM wait until you click it... I just have it in my Taskbar and click it to start).

3) RAPID MODE:
Since you keep mentioning the Intel cache option which again doesn't make sense here, you may want to try this (after you benchmark to see if the SSD performance values are correct).

RAPID MODE will use your main system memory as a buffer which can help if the SSD buffer fills up. It's really hard to test but I've seen no indication that it can cause issues and the system memory usage is very minor. In fact, I can't even find it so it probably doesn't use any until you need it.

Ironically, Rapid Mode would help a crappy SSD a lot more than a good Samsung SSD.

(again, the BENCHMARK values are now useless. It is directed towards the system memory instead... Just FYI, but an SSD has a huge pool of memory such as TLC memory. Like a hard drive, there is a small CACHE that is faster such as SLC memory. When files write they go into this cache, and if it doesn't FILL UP then then you may get performance similar to a much faster drive.

Reading is similar but the target drive may be slow thus forcing everything to slow down.

However, when you fill up the cache you are then limited by the speed of the main memory. On some drives you see performance drop much, much lower due to this.

RAPID MODE will use system memory if it needs to. Your system memory such as the DDR4 memory sticks are faster than the SSD cache. So if your cache fills up then the data such as music files fills up the system memory, then gets written to the SSD. You are still ultimately limited by the write or read speed of the slowest SSD memory, but from the USER point of few tasks can "finish" quickly even though they may still take time to finish.)

 

[prrathamesh]

@photonboy
Great In depth answer there. Thank you. That should help me setting SSD.

Rapid mode is part of Samsung magician ? because last memory sticks part is interesting. I have 16Gigs of DDR3 memory too , (vengeance series ) but its hardly used even after caching almost 6gigs are free, only thing that is filling it up is chrome which wastes the Uber lot of memory thus I switched to Firefox.

I was looking for RAMDISK caching or RAM caching application but none gaved me good results thus i assumed that I wasted money on my sticks should have bought SSD before.