SSD Caching

[Terrails]

First I'll list my storage devices:

Samsung EVO 860 500GB SSD

Some old Patriot 120 GB SSD

1 TB WD Blue

 

Basically I would like to use my old 120GB SSD to cache the commonly used data from my WD Blue. I couldn't find anything related to this since all the threads only talked about a cache when only 1 SSD is present, so my question is if this is possible? Basically doing nothing to my "main" Samsung SSD and just turning the old SSD into a cache for the HDD.

[VersuS]

Not in a way that works reliably and without risk of potentially bricking the hdd as far as I'm aware.

 

[Founders]

You could use a program called PrimoCache. It has options for both L1 (RAM) and L2 (SSD) caching, you could use both but if you're just interested in using your old SATA SSD to improve the performance of your mechanical drive it should work just fine. It's not difficult to setup and they include a 30 day evaluation period and it's $30 after that. Just format the SSD, set it up in Primo as your caching pool, you can choose a portion of it (if you have two separate partitions on the drive) or the entire drive, it's up to you, then select your mechanical drive in the New Cache Task window to start caching to your SSD. 

 

   

[Terrails]

12 minutes ago, Founders said:

You could use a program called PrimoCache. It has options for both L1 (RAM) and L2 (SSD) caching, you could use both but if you're just interested in using your old SATA SSD to improve the performance of your mechanical drive it should work just fine. It's not difficult to setup and they include a 30 day evaluation period and it's $30 after that. Just format the SSD, set it up in Primo as your caching pool, you can choose a portion of it (if you have two separate partitions on the drive) or the entire drive, it's up to you, then select your mechanical drive in New Cache Task window to start caching to your SSD. 

 

   

Thanks, I guess I'll give this a try

[NewMaxx]

Tiered storage with Storage Spaces would be pretty easy to set up. Caching and tiering are different, mind you.

[Terrails]

2 minutes ago, NewMaxx said:

Tiered storage with Storage Spaces would be pretty easy to set up. Caching and tiering are different, mind you.

I've read about it before posting this thread and that could technically work, but I would honestly feel more secure if all the data was stored on the HDD instead of both since the SSD is good 4+ years old at this point and the HDD is nearing 1 year now. That's why I prefer using a cache for this case.

[NewMaxx]

Makes sense. I use DrivePool with the SSD Optimizer for that, but it's not ideal for your use case. PrimoCache probably would be more suitable.