Before anyone post anything please note that I am not currently interested in getting a "caching SSD" for a Hard Drive for myself, I was just wondering whether there would be any benefit. Example below.

I have 120GB SSD with everything on it that's important, I also have a 500GB 5,400rpm laptop drive for general non-important local storage as well as the full backup for my SSD.

The question is: Would there be any realistic performance increase by using a "Caching SSD" for the Hard Drive.

Judging by the way they work, the answer would be "none at all" as most of the data that gets written/read will ultimately end up on another drive anyway, or its my ever expanding backup of my SSD which is far to large to be cached in any meaningful way if it was even possible to cache the "data-writes", which it is not.

Can anyone confirm or deny my thinking without wasting much of your time.

I suspect that if I want faster secondary/backup storage I would be much better off getting a larger and faster HDD rather than sodding around with expensive SSD Caching.


Andy

Not unless you're sometimes running some software(games for instance) from the storage drive, or often load a large numbers of documents/pictures off it. To me this whole separate SSD-caching thing ought to fast become a fad as SSD's keep dropping in price, though I can certainly see a use for it in laptop models where the customer wants to have a large integrated storage space.

If you have spare memory slots and often keep the system on constantly over a day, adding more RAM might be a worthwhile boost for general drive cache. RAM is so cheap today if all you'd need would be two 4GB sticks. I toy around a bit with RAM-disks and toy with the idea of going from 16 to 32 GB.

Nope. That pretty much means that you agree with me that it would be useless.



Perhaps it will be useful for a few people, but as you say not for the vast majority.



For some people that might be worthwhile, but not for me, I already have 8GB of RAM and an SSD, and rarely keep my PC on overnight so even more RAM would be worthless to me at the moment.

One of the reasons why I asked the question is whether a Hybrid drive would be any better under the circumstances I have outlined - it would add no performance benefit from the SSD component and would cost more for the amount of storage it provides - its only benefit would be that it would spin down the drive more frequently - but that might be a bad thing from my usage as it would also spin up more regularly as well.


Andy

For you, no.

I think the only decent play for these is in a laptop with only one storage bay and you don't want to spend the $'s for a large SSD.