SSD for cache

airborn824

Honorable
Mar 3, 2013
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10,690
i have been planning to upgrade my storage for my PC but could not decide between WD Black or Seagate Barraccuda dives. Geek Squad friend of mine at work took his SSD and made it a cache drive. Is that possible? if so is it worth it? i currently have a 500g Seagate Sata 3, 75g seagate SATA 3 for my OS, and a 111g SSD from Gskill for games. whats the best cheap or quick fix for HDD performance? Thank you all ahead of time for your input.
 
Hi -

I can share my two recent expiences wth this.

I recently built a basic home use machine and I included an SSD to cache the HD using Intel's SRT tchnology. It worked seamlessly and has been a nice performance boost. This solution is truly cache-only, and you'll not get any additional space from the SSD. For this you'll need a MOBO that supports SRT.

I've also re-built my family gaming machine w/ two SSDs - the first for the OS and common apps, and the second for swap space, temp files, antivirus, log files, etc. HDs are primarily storage and large games. Did not cache the HDs. Note that while this is an older machine w/ SATA-2 interfaces, the boot time and overall responsiveness are *noticeably* better than before, even for games I'm running from the HD.

Some SSDs come with caching software. I haven't tried this, so I've no experience to offer here.

When I decided to re-build and nstall the SSDs in my family/gaming PC, it was a question of how much pain I was going to have to endure to backup and restore all of the files and programs after I re-installed the OS. I decided it was, and I'm certainly happy with the performance.

Your other option is to install the SSD and then do some serious optimization to push all of the on-going read/write activity to the SSD - swap files, temp files, log files, etc. I had this setup for a while, but I really didn't notice a significant performance increase.

Also some general notes - you'll want to disable the pre-fetch, superfetch, and a few other items; otherwise, Windows tries to "optimize" your SSD as if it were an HD. Google "SSD Optimization" and you'll get lots of good recomendations on what to do here.

Hope this helps.

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