SSD caching/ boot drive?

[ihateenglishweather]

Hello, I was wondering if it were possible to use a single ssd as both a boot drive and cache(intel smart caching; z68). The ssd I plan on using is about 60gb; would this be enough? Oh and if there's already a thread about this please post a link to it below, as I am in quite a rush. Will be back to check up at approximately midnight BST. Loads of thanks for any help
Cheers,
Will

 

[tokencode]

I do not believe this is possible, but even if it was I'm not sure you would want to do that. 60GB is about the minimum I would want for a boot volume and a dedicated SSD is much faster than the caching solution. You would also compete for bandwidth depending on what your doing, especially copying from your cached storage to the SSD etc, that would cause a read on the SSD and a write back to the SSD and writing new cache? Seems to me like things would behave strangely even if it worked....

 

[RetiredChief]

^ Concur. Min recommended size 60->80 with recommended size 90->128 Gig.

The recommendation in all the reviews that I've read on SRT - bottom line, if you can afford a SSD for operating system and programs, That is the route to go.

Itel's 311 SSD is speacially designed for this, 20 Gig SLC SSD (Note it is not MLC).
SRT increase HDD performance by 2 ->4X and that is highly user dependent compared to 20->40X for SSD as boot/program drive.
There are some comparisions using a large MLC 40 gig SSD for this (Max size for SRT is 64 Gig).
My take is that the Jury is still out on using MLC SSD for SRT in terms of longevity. You have NO control over how much and how often the Cells are written to.

 

[rcrodgers]

I was going to ask a similar question as the original poster, but I think it would be better to just add my version to this thread. I'm preparing to build a new system and just as a spur of the moment thought, I'm wondering about any advantage/drawbacks of using an SSD as strictly a boot drive for Windows 7, Linux (Fedora), and possibly another OS or two.

It's simple enough to configure Linux to use a partition as a boot partition only, but I've never really tried that with Windows. I know that I could set the swap to use a different drive in Windows, but what other headaches would I run into? Would there be any real speed advantage to using a SSD in this way? (The system will be using at least one SATA 6Gb/s hard disk.)

Thanks in advance for any input.

 

[ihateenglishweather]

Best answer selected by ihateenglishweather.

 

[Maziar]

This topic has been closed by Maziar