Anyone use intel SSD cache to speed up a HDD ??

Must admit I've not tried it, but I wouldn't think you'll get much or any benefit caching a storage drive - presumably all files on there are quite large(?) so it won't be able to cache many of them. And I think the main benefits of SSDs come from caching relatively small frequently used files (such as all the OS files, program files, etc) In fact I seem to recall some info about Intel SSD caching not even trying to cache files bigger than a few MBs so you might end up caching very little.


EDIT: Having said that (and reading a bit more about it) if you have programs or games installed on your HDD you should see some decent performance improvements.
Edited by sidefx79 - 11/19/12 at 5:28pm

I use SSD caching on my HDD in my development PC. I even got one of Intels special cache SSDs for that purpose (20GB SLC drive)

I don't have room on my main SSD for all the development resources i need (and some games are on there as well), and since its quite a lot of small files, it sure feels like the cache is doing a good job.

Just install drive and use Intels driver tool in Windows, nothing spectacular.

Thanks for posting this. I was thinking of doing the same for my dev machine at work with one of the cache SSDs but I was not sure if it would benefit vs. just replacing the whole HDD with a large SSD (expensive!). I'd give anything to speed up IntelliJ .

It does not compare to a real SSD at all, there is still a world of difference there. But it does help of course.

*Cough*

ZFS could use that smaller SSD as a cach for your storage server.

*Cough*

Pure storage doesn't need caching. You can easily saturate a GBit network line with a good storage setup, everything else is just wasted.

I don't see any benefit for media storage, even if the network weren't the bottleneck, assuming the caching scheme is some kind of variant of LRU. Think about these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_algorithms compared to the pattern of usage with media storage -- it's too random.