To SSD cache or not?

wilber · 22 Dec 2011 at 12:12

I am looking at a new build using one of these motherboards

MSI Z68A-GD65-G3 Intel Z68
or
Asrock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 Intel Z68

My Question is, do i buy a Crucial RealSSD M4 128GB and put my OS and maybe 1-2 games on it and keep the rest of my games/files on a 500GB mechanical HDD

Or Purchase a Crucial RealSSD M4 64GB and a Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 32MB Cache and use the 500gb drive as my main drive and the 64gb drive as a SSD cache drive?

The system is mostly used for gaming and work.

Orcvader · 22 Dec 2011 at 13:06

If you can afford the 128gb, how about splitting the SSD to two partitions? Something like 64gb for the OS and some software, while the rest goes on caching? There are a few extra steps on doing this though, but I can't remember what they were...

Triggaaar · 22 Dec 2011 at 13:17

Does using it as a cache mean it will be constantly written to, and significantly shorten it's life? Or have I got that completely wrong

Orcvader · 22 Dec 2011 at 15:18

Triggaaar said:
Does using it as a cache mean it will be constantly written to, and significantly shorten it's life? Or have I got that completely wrong

There's two caching modes in Intel RST, one of them does indeed constantly write on the drive which can shorten it's lifespan, but the standard caching mode only writes on the drive when needed. Most of the time it's just reading. This is the best mode to have to ensure a long SSD lifespan, however it takes a while to get the best performance as it takes time for RST to learn what files are commonly used to cache, but well worth it.

wilber · 23 Dec 2011 at 08:16

Orcvader said:
If you can afford the 128gb, how about splitting the SSD to two partitions? Something like 64gb for the OS and some software, while the rest goes on caching? There are a few extra steps on doing this though, but I can't remember what they were...

This seems a sensible idea. although I would have to use my old mechanical drive and not a new Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 32MB Cache one as my budget seems to be slipping away from me all the time!

Xelene · 23 Dec 2011 at 09:46

I'm using a 64GB C4 at the moment as a cache on a 2TB drive. It's working out pretty well for me. There's two modes of cache, regular and extreme.

The only difference is the extreme one doesn't constantly write your data - so performs better and can give you data loss. I've been meaning to pull the cache out of the RAID and see what state the drive is in.

The drive life may be significantly shortened - but you won't suffer any data problems if it does fail.