This is a weird question.

[R.Grady]

So I recently have come very close to filling my 1TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD, I was considering buying a 2TB HDD the Seagate Barracuda Compute to be exact and combining there storage. 1. What would the performance drop look like?

2. And hypothetically can I use a m.2 ssd as a cache for the ssd and HDD that are combined?

3. If that hypothetical is plausible what m.2 ssd should I get?

[bellabichon]

1. The performance drop is definitely going to be noticeable, especially for big files. UserBenchmark (not always an accurate source, I know, but for drives it's fine) says that the Seagate Barracuda 2TB gets ~139MB/s sequential reads, ~149MB/s sequential writes, ~2.03MB/s random 4k reads, and ~0.95MB/s random 4k writes. This is compared to the Samsung 860 Evo 1TB which gets ~487MB/s sequential reads, ~445MB/s sequential writes, ~38.6MB/s random 4k reads, and ~96MB/s random 4k writes. This means that especially on random reads, the Seagate HDD is going to be a lot slower.

 

2. I'm not very familiar with RAID and other storage configurations, but I know enough to tell you that what you'd like to do isn't very common. Why exactly do you want to set up and M.2 drive to act as a cache for both the SSD and HDD? The extra performance from that cache will only really help the HDD, and there are already functional solutions on the market (Intel Optane, etc) which do basically that same job. Why not just put your OS and regularly used programs on the SSD, and your larger games and archival files on the HDD?

 

3. See question 2. 

[Goldilock]

I don't know exactly your usage.

 

If the HDD is only cold storage (storing anime collection, old videos, etc.) the performance will drop but non day to day basis won't be noticeable,

 

If you are storing active files (videos on edit, games) like the guy, it will be very noticeable.

[R.Grady]

New question can I setup a certain portion of my ssd let's say 64gb to cache for a hdd and have the remaining storage used in tandem with the ssd? Would this help compensate for the performance loss some for games enough to be worth not spending an extra $40-$50 for a 1tb ssd?

[seagate_surfer]

2 hours ago, R.Grady said:

New question can I setup a certain portion of my ssd let's say 64gb to cache for a hdd and have the remaining storage used in tandem with the ssd? Would this help compensate for the performance loss some for games enough to be worth not spending an extra $40-$50 for a 1tb ssd?

There is a solution that is not limited to any specific platform such as Optane from Intel or StoreMI. It's called Primocache but I've never seen anyone format and partition an SSD to use only part of it for hardware acceleration.

• https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/help.html

The fall or loss of performance is not necessarily due to the storage device by the way. If you are used to doing many things at once, an SSD will definitely help you, but when it comes to better graphics, they won't be better when they come from an SSD or an HDD. On the other hand, the acceleration of HDDs is already included in SSHDs without any software, an SSHD is the best non-SSD type of storage because it runs faster than any HDD but they are not faster than SSDs, however they continue to be a cheaper option with better loading times and large storage capacity.