1 SSD & 2 HDDs Setup

[Trathe]

Hello Ladies and Gents,

I just discovered fancy cache the other day and am currently struggling to figure out what my best set up would be.

I have a 64GB SSD that I have my OS and programs installed on, I also have 2 500GB HDD's that are in a RAID 0 Array. Ultimately this PC get's used for gaming and as a media hub for my home network.
What would be the smartest set up for me to notice a difference while gaming. (note- the games are all installed on the RAID array)

PC Specs:

Windows 7 64 bit
Intel i5-3500k
16GB RAM
64GB SSD
2x500GB HDD (Raid 0)
Nvidia GT560 TI

[dustyny]

Hi Trathe,

Welcome..

With the small 64GB SSD acting as your OS drive, I'd advise against using it as a level 2 cache. You always want to leave SSDs with at least 1/4 free space for maintenance and with the OS, the Pagefile, Windows updates and data you can't have a lot of room on that drive. What you can do is dedicate a certain amount of RAM to the HDDs, change the write delay, just keep in mind the bigger the delay, the nicer the experience but the bigger risk you take of killing your data. Then again you're running raid 0 on two drives so hopefully either your data is easily replaceable or you back up often.

Here is a quote from another thread, hopefully it will help you get your head around what caching is and how it will work for you. If you have more specific questions, let me know and I'll try to give you some answers.

I have to be honest if you're looking to reduce game load time and you shutdown your machine frequently, you might not get the boost you're looking because cache data does not persist after reboot.. The thing to keep in mind is that cache's have to be filled before they'll have any affect on performance and in order to do that the data has to be read from the drive which is going to be slow.

Forgive the allegory (I'm not trying to be condescending). If you are having a hard time visualizing how this works, perhaps this will help.

Lets say you go to the library and you want to find a particular sentence in a specific book. You go to the card catalog, find the number and physically locate the book, you open the book a proceed to read through it looking for that specific sentence. This is similar to the slow HDD works. It takes a long time (compared to ram or SSD) for a HDD to find and transfer the data from the platters.

Now you have the right book with a nice brightly colored sticker tag next to the sentence on the desk in front of you. You proceed to do this with a number of books. Now when you need that sentence its right in front of you and all you have to do is open the book (reading from RAM cache) and read it. This is similar to caching. You are keeping regularly used or important information in the fastest most convenient place which is your RAM, followed be the 2nd fastest which would be SSDs.

Now lets say you fill up the desk so you start putting the books on the chairs next to you. They're faster to get to then the shelves but not as fast as having it on the desk in front of you. That would be your level 2 SSD cache.

You've been working all day at the library and the desks and chairs around you are all filled up with books. Now you really could use the desk and chair space, so you start looking for books that you haven't needed recently or don't need anymore and you put them on a cart so the librarian can put them back on the shelves for you. This is how your cache expiration works, depending on the configuration you choose the old data will be removed from the cache depending on what you've told the program is more important.

Finally at the end of the day you leave the marked books on the table and you go home, the librarian takes the books puts them on the cart and as the library closes they remove the markers and put them back in their place on the shelves. The next day when you come back to the library you have to start again from the beginning. This is similar to a reboot. Since the caches don't persist past a reboot, you lose the advantage of having them when you shutdown the machine.