SSD Caching vs Partitions

[eddiew]

Hi all,

Simple question, possibly a hard answer

I'm tempted by a small SSD (say 60 gig) to set up as a cache for my main 1TB hard drive - but I'm also a fan of partitions, and said drive is split into 4, which I'm very very reluctant to faff around with.

So, when using the almighty power of the Z68 chipset in this way, am I going to get stuck with only caching one partition, or is it smart enough to do all of them as a disk? Or would I be able to set up separate 20GB caches for each partition?

Cheers!

 

[eddiew]

using an SSD just to cache a mechanical hard drive is surely overkill?

I'm kind of assuming there's a reason the feature is built into the Z68 chipset

Plus not all my applications are on my OS drive - and I strongly suspect 2/3rds of files on C:\ are not regularly used. Kind of hoping that the smart caching will select only the stuff that's actually useful on high speed access

 

[eddiew]

Performance benchmarks are definitely convincing

Still not sure how it'd react to having 4 partitions on my primary HDD though... Anyone tried to do that before?

 

[eddiew]

I guess I'm the only person in the world who still partitions his main HDD then

Unfortunately google does not know what will happen if I have a 100 gig windows partition, and a 900 gig stuff partition, and want to put an SSD cache on the whole drive

 

[eddiew]

The partition is at the OS level. The caching happens at the drive and sector level. So your SSD would cache the whole drive - or rather whichever bits of the drive you use most. If most of your access is from the C: drive, then thats what will end up in the cache.

I would be completely fine with this happening, if only I could find the bit of the SRT documentation that says that is the behaviour you get.

Last thing I want is to discover it caches C: only: boot times are the last of my concerns. Having my many gigs of photoshop files, a couple of hefty games, and launching basic apps accellerated is much more interesting