Question Using 128GB SSD as cache for WB Black Caviar 1TB

[Rene66]

I'm planning to upgrade my system with NVME 500gb drive. Currently I have one 128gb sata ssd and HDD, Is there any option I can use those two efficiently together, I've read something about using SSD as cache but would that work? I want to use HDD primarily for games that I don't play as much as those on NVME, for videos and other files, like music ...

 

[USAFRet]

Video and music gets zero benefit from a SSD cache for the HDD.
Games, only a tiny bit and not all the time.

Better to use that 128GB SSD as an individual drive. Put a couple of games on it.

 

[popatim]

For an intel system you are limited to 64GB of cache and, I think, the rest would be wasted space. You would need to change to Raid mode for the chipset Sata type in order to enable caching. Then i't's just a matter of installing Intel RST if you don't already have it and set it up in the Acceleration section.

For AMD they allow up to 256GB but you need a 400 series motherboard with Secure boot off and Sata type set to AHCI. Then it's Installing StoreMI and setting up the 'Tiered Storage'

 

[RayOfDark]

I was doing what the OP is proposing with a 120GB SATA SSD and Intel SRT for a couple of years and the benefits are huge if you're a gamer. Not so much otherwise. Most commonly played game loading times were typically halved, and micro-stutter in most games that suffered from it was totally eliminated.

It's not necessarily a waste of space to use a 120/128GB SSD for the job either as having a few tens of GBs of over-provisioning beyond the used 64GB keeps IOPS at very close to fresh-out-of-box levels at all times with zero requirement for user intervention at any time. Unless/until something breaks, it really is a set-and-forget solution.

I've since gone SATA SSD entirely for games storage as I slowly migrate the entire system away from spinners to SSDs, and the same SSD is now caching a pair of 3TB WD Red spinners in RAID 1 used for media storage. As USAFRet rightly states, the gains are no longer as tangible as they were when games caching for fairly obvious reasons, but it still helps some of the time.

I'm not sure what happens when you mix games and media on the same cached drive though. Does SRT have the intelligence to not kick games out of the cache in favour of, say, huge video files, or will the cached game file blocks be overwritten during such an event meaning that the same game will need re-caching?

If you can arrange a games-only spinner, it will definitely work as expected. If not, I'm not so sure.