What is SSD Caching good for?

[Track]

I read the recent Z68 article where Tom's displays using an SSD a cache for as much larger HDD.

Now, I don't dispute that SSD Caching increases the drive's theoretical performance..

But I am wondering what kind of things you'd have to have your HDD to see any real-world difference.

Personally, I have a 256GB C300 (hoping for 512GB RAID 0 soon) and so I keep all my programs and games on it.

I only use my HDD array (8TB RAID 0) for housing my media, such as FLAC audio, my photography and movies with I legally rip from my collection of Blu-rays for quick playback.

I don't think there would be a difference in performance when opening a simple audio file..

And on the opposite end, there's no way a 30GB drive could contain my 40-50GB BD rips, nor my Gigapixels photography.

So, I don't understand what this feature is good for, if anything, besides simply making the HDD faster on paper.

I'd appreciate any input!

 

[WyomingKnott]

My totally off-the-wall guess: it's not good for that much, yet.

The intended function is to cache things that you load frequently, like your OS. Best-case, it would be the equivalent of putting your OS and most frequently used programs on SSD, and your other software on an HDD (which has proven to be hard to do).

Worst-case, it will be as great a success as Ready Boost.

I'm hoping that right now it's just an immature technology and it will improve as time goes by.

 

[Track]

I'm just trying to think if it's worth it to buy a 50-75$ SSD to marry to my 8TB RAID 0 array, not to mention having to wait for Z68 to come out.

 

[vvhocare5]

No. The benefit is to speed up the access to smaller frequently accessed files. No benefit to movies or audio as the disk can feed it faster than you can play it...

Quite possible it would help on a hard drive system that Win 7 was installed on. But one could add a little more RAM and let Windows cache a lot of system files - at RAM speeds...

 

[Track]

So, Z68 is for n00bs.

That's what I wanted to know.

 

[wolfram23]

Also you should look into SSD RAID because you will lose the TRIM function.