It’s time to build me a new PC, my current desktop is now 6 plus years old. I will be transferring 2 3Tb Western Digital SATA drives to the new system and am looking at a 2Tb Samsung 990 Pro NMVe to be my new C:\ system drive.
My questions is, does it make sense to buy something like a 1Tb Samsung 980 Pro MNVe and dedicate it as a cache for the WD drives. I do have a spare 2Tb Samsung 870 QVO drive that I could use instead, although it’s performance would not be as good as a 980 Pro.
I’ve never used a SSD as a drive cache before, so is it worth looking into?
For reference, I mostly do data analysis, custom web applications and hobby video and audio editing, plus streaming and older generation video gaming.
A small SSD (like 128GB) can help speed things up with older platter hard drives (spinning hard disks). It can be any size I guess but a huge drive for caching is probably overkill.
I have not tried it but I have read some who say it made using the slower hard drives seem faster. Some recommend using a UPS power backup if you do write-caching. If power goes out and the cache has not yet written to the hard disk you could lose that information. You can do read caching only if you want which does not need that kind of safety net.
Sure, SSD caching can be a significant speed up, so it’s worth looking into in general. But the main question is how much you would benefit from it.
In my experience, a lot of stuff doesn’t really benefit from faster access. Documents and images are generally too small to benefit. Neither does audio or video if all you want to do is play them. Video editing definitely benefits from faster access during the project, but then doesn’t benefit much once it has been completed. Applications definitely benefit, though. And games in particular tend to load a lot of data, so they benefit. And, of course, the OS itself benefits greatly, including the swap file.
So the big question is whether or not you have enough of the type of stuff that would benefit from faster access that you couldn’t fit all of it on the 2GB drive. It would depend heavily on the contents of those hard drives.
Personally, I’d not bother with the drive at first, and then try using the computer without a cache. And then, if I felt things were slow at all, I’d try using the SSD you already have. And then, if it’s better, but think you could do better, only then would I consider buying a new, faster SSD.
Also, I’d probably stick with the built in stuff that comes with your motherboard, either from AMD or Intel. I do like Primocache, but you don’t really need it if you have a separate drive for caching.
Thanks for your advice. I was planning on using the Intel caching app, since I’ve decided to go with an i7 Core-12700K CPU and will need an LGA 1700 motherboard.
I will try your suggestion, no cache to start, then try my spare Samsung SATA SSD and see what happens.
@Whack-a-Mole - I do use a UPS so power outages during cache write-back shouldn’t be a problem
SSD versus spinning rust is a massive speed jump. But whether caching on the SSD is worthwhile versus just using it as your primary drive and wearing the fact that stuff on the legacy drives is slow is a different matter.
Caching systems bring with them risks and they don’t always provide the performance one might wish for. First time access to old files is slow anyway, and you are at the mercy of the cache algorithms to have stuff migrate. A big enough cache and aggressive caching may work if you have a large amount of stuff you never access but just keep around. YMMV.
Personally I just live with the split and copy old stuff to the legacy drive manually. If you need to revisit old stuff - say old video editing tasks you can always copy back. Very often the direction data goes is one way.
Just having system and application files on SSD is a huge win.
Why not just get a 4tb and a 2tb sata SSD to replace the spinning disks? They won’t be as fast as an nvme drive, but they will be miles faster than those old ones.
The system I’m replacing has a 850Gb SSD as the system drive and 2 3Tb WD Gold NAS spinner hardrives for data. I bought the 2 Tb Samsung SSD thinking that I’d upgrade the current system drive with it, but then decided why not upgrade everything. I currently have about 4.5 Tb of data spread across the WD drives. I could probably migrate about 700 Gb of this (mostly video game installations) to the new NVMe drive but right now I don’t want to replace the WD’s.
Not really. Converting CDN to US your drive was about $13.56/GB.
That Samsung drive above is $9.62/GB. About 29% less expensive. Not to mention using a large capacity drive for a cache is a waste in most circumstances for home use. I built a Synology NAS for a co-worker recently with 14.5TB of storage and Synology uses a 250GB SSD for cache (although it is ECC and two sticks running in a RAID-1).
But I agree with @BigT too. See how it goes without the cache. You can always add it later.
Seriously… if whatever is stored on the spinning disks is time-critical, then get SSDs and move that data to them.
If not, then why bother? It’s not like you’re loading off floppy or anything.
I speak from a certain degree of experience- I’ve got a NVMe Samsung 970 m.2 drive as my system drive, a somewhat lesser NVMe m.2 SSD as my primary gaming drive, a Seagate Firecuda hybrid, and a few older spinning disks (WD black, WD blue, and some weird Hitachi).
Anyway, that Seagate Firecuda hybrid is basically a factory-built version of what you are proposing- a 3 tb 7200 RPM disk with a built-in SSD and automatic data transfer/cache handling between the two (supposedly with predictive load, etc…) . The sales literature makes it sound like it’s a 3 TB SSD for a low price, but in practice, it’s highly dependent on what I’m doing. If I’m playing a lot of the same game, it is indeed SSD-like, but if I’m playing multiple games, it ends up having to hit the physical disk part a lot, and it acts like a hard drive.
Overall, it’s better than spinning disks, but not so much so that I think I’d bother with it again, and I certainly wouldn’t be trying to scheme something like that up with standalone SSDs.
In addition to the speed increase, if you spinners are getting old then what is the chance of failure in the near future? Unless you have a specific reason to keep your current hard disks I would seriously consider migrating the data over to NVMe, or at least SATA SSDs. The LGA 1700 I got can have up to four NVMe’s including a Gen 5 for when those become viable as an option.
