SSD + HDD

[giovanni86]

I have a new build coming up and had question regarding SSD Caching. I've been looking into the new Z77 Boards with ASUS and there boards are capable of doing caching supposably. I was wondering if anyone at all has any experience with it, considering on a different topic in tomshardware people told me that it doesn't work. See my question is i will be buying that ASUS board, i have a 64GB samsung 830 series SSD, i also have two 3TB Seagate HDD's that i plan to put in a raid setup. A lot people are telling me to put the SSD as the main boot, my problem with that is what about all my games? I currently have a 1TB HDD, my games on my PC take up about 90% of space on it currently, and no i don't play 10 games, i play over 100 at any given time of the year, i guess you can say I'm a bit old school but i enjoy my gaming sessions very much. Anyone with experience who can help me with this dilemma?

 

[geofelt]

Disclaimer... I have no experience with ssd cacheing.

But, knowing how it is supposed to work, I think it could work for you.
If your usage pattern is to play one game for a while, and then switch ot another.
The first time you access the game, there would be no improvement.
Successive times, the games would load faster.

That said, I would not want to give up the benefits of using a SSD for the os drive. Everything seems so much quicker.

Can you do both?

As to raid, what kind of raid are you thinking of, and what do you wish to accomplish?
In general, I don't think much of raid for the average home user.

 

[J_E_D_70]

Geo is right, if you play a handful at a time for a while each, caching may help. If you switch what you're playing every day it doesn't buy you anything.

If you're going raid0, make sure to do backups early and often. I did that for a while and never lost anything but better safe than sorry.

 

[djscribbles]

As an alternative to caching:
SteamMover, google that. It will let you move individual games between your SSD and your HDDs.

It basically uses symlinks (a low level shortcut) to move games between the two.

Also, make sure you follow some of these steps: http://thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/optimization-guides/the-ssd-optimization-guide-2/
To minimize the size of your windows install on the SSD (hibernation, pagefile, and restore points are the big ones for saving space).

Move your Users directories off to another drive to save some more space:
http://lifehacker.com/5467758/move-the-users-directory-in-windows-7

I set my PC up this way, but I prefer to have direct control over what is running from the SSD. I find my 60GB drive is plenty of space for the mix of games I play at any given time.

 

[giovanni86]

Disclaimer... I have no experience with ssd cacheing.

But, knowing how it is supposed to work, I think it could work for you.
If your usage pattern is to play one game for a while, and then switch ot another.
The first time you access the game, there would be no improvement.
Successive times, the games would load faster.

That said, I would not want to give up the benefits of using a SSD for the os drive. Everything seems so much quicker.

Can you do both?

As to raid, what kind of raid are you thinking of, and what do you wish to accomplish?
In general, I don't think much of raid for the average home user.

I was hoping to have a big enough drive to last me a long while, meaning having those two drives store all my games and any future games for the next 5+ years. And as to both what do you mean? Someone on here told me to use the SSD as a boot drive and the two drives in a raid setup for my games, is that even possible i could of sworn u needed the games installed on your OS drive which is why that idea seemed nuts to me.

 

[djscribbles]

No, you can install games anywhere and run them. If you use steam (which was my assumption) seperating your games can be a hassle because they download to whatever location steam is installed to, SteamMover (or manually using symlink) is the best way to get around that behavior.

But you definitely do not need to keep all your games on the same drive, and they don't have to be on the OS drive.

 

[giovanni86]

Best answer selected by giovanni86.