Faster or larger ssd for L2 cache?

[yhKIM]

I am trying to accelerate my 1TB HDD via primocache.

I have two ssd to spare.

120 gb sata3 ssd(samsung)

and 32gb intel optane 800p

My cpu is sandybridge so I don't have official optane support.

which ssd would be better? in that 1tb hdd, there are vm files (hyper-v ubuntu)

that I use for my data analysis

[Jaga]

It depends on your usage, and how much data you have needing to be cached. How full is the 1TB drive? If it's only ~320 GB full, the Optane would do well. If it's more like 500+ GB full, the Samsung would be a better choice. I try to get somewhere between 10% and 20% data coverage (the size of the L2) with any L1/L2 caching task.

Seeing as you have VM files that get used, they would probably run much faster on the Samsung, since it would cache a larger chunk of them over time. Just guessing, but it seems logical.

[yhKIM]

It depends on your usage, and how much data you have needing to be cached. How full is the 1TB drive? If it's only ~320 GB full, the Optane would do well. If it's more like 500+ GB full, the Samsung would be a better choice. I try to get somewhere between 10% and 20% data coverage (the size of the L2) with any L1/L2 caching task.

Seeing as you have VM files that get used, they would probably run much faster on the Samsung, since it would cache a larger chunk of them over time. Just guessing, but it seems logical.

As you suspected I do use at least half of my 1TB HDD most of the times.

I guess I should stick with 120gb ssd than.

Thank you for the advice