Possibility on using SSD cache on secondary drive?

[RaynbowDeath]

My 1TB SSD Boot drive only has 60 GB remaining, and a good chunk of it is taken up by recordings (whether by shadowplay or downloaded lecture series).
I also have a 3TB HDD that I initially planned to use as secondary storage. Although from my previous methods of moving some of my dated recordings to it, I basically thought that I'm just using my boot drive as a cache for recordings and just write them to my hard drive after some time anyway.

 

This over time will get pretty tedious and so I've looked into maybe using a partition of my boot drive or maybe getting an additional SSD just to act as a cache for my HDD. Looking into methods for SSD caching however, I've only seen it being mentioned done for HDDs used as boot drives. Would SSD caching be possible on my secondary drive? And is it feasible? My initial idea of getting a HDD when building this PC was for media storage but after checking SSD cache, it might be also be used on additional games that demand a lot of storage.

Below are my drives' userbenchmarks if it helps with your assessment and recommendations. Thanks!

[AbydosOne]

8 minutes ago, RaynbowDeath said:

Would SSD caching be possible on my secondary drive?

It's technically possible, yes.

 

9 minutes ago, RaynbowDeath said:

And is it feasible?

For large files, it won't make much difference. The real benefit of caching is in cases of many, many small files being accessed rapids, e.g. an OS at boot.

 

10 minutes ago, RaynbowDeath said:

My initial idea of getting a HDD when building this PC was for media storage but after checking SSD cache, it might be also be used on additional games that demand a lot of storage.

Most games up until recently assumed that they would be stored on relatively slow media, so it won't improve game performance much if any to launch games from SSD vs HDD. Would recommend moving all videos (etc) to HDD, and leave the SSD for OS and games.

[Acewing]

Videos have no tangible benefit to being on the SSD so don't keep them there. In fact, download your lectures directly to your HDD. Makes little sense to use the SSD for that. 
Caching is also meaningless for a storage drive, even though you can obviously do it.
 

[RaynbowDeath]

1 hour ago, AbydosOne said:

It's technically possible, yes.

 

For large files, it won't make much difference. The real benefit of caching is in cases of many, many small files being accessed rapids, e.g. an OS at boot.

 

Most games up until recently assumed that they would be stored on relatively slow media, so it won't improve game performance much if any to launch games from SSD vs HDD. Would recommend moving all videos (etc) to HDD, and leave the SSD for OS and games.

I've read that they do at least benefit in loading times, right? If not, would it just be fine for additional games to be installed at HDD if my SSD is full?

 

48 minutes ago, Acewing said:

Videos have no tangible benefit to being on the SSD so don't keep them there. In fact, download your lectures directly to your HDD. Makes little sense to use the SSD for that. 
Caching is also meaningless for a storage drive, even though you can obviously do it.
 

My downloads folder and other path locations have been defaulted to boot drive. They also seemed to be loaded faster when I try to reencode or edit them.

Would it make sense to cache so that it can act as a secondary drive for games though? Because currently Apps take up half of my boot drive already but I doubt when my HDD would reach its capacity.

[Acewing]

You can change your defaults easily. Re-encoding would work better on an SSD, but you can move them back to HDD after that. 
Oh, and check what these "Apps and Features" are in the first place. There are a lot of smaller apps that get very little benefit by being on an SSD. Games, though, leave them there. There's almost always a tangible improvement in modern games. 

 

In general, use HDD for storing videos (You can save shadowplay and re-encoded files to SSD for a boost during the recording/re-encoding, but move the files to HDD afterwards) and use the SSD for games and bigger apps 

 
As for caching, at this point, I'm not even sure what you want to do. If you're going to buy a new SSD altogether, you're better off just using that for games directly rather than trying to cache stuff off the HDD. Caching is pretty much a "hack" that you do if you have no other option, and is also of little use if the drive being cached is not your boot drive.

[RaynbowDeath]

5 minutes ago, Acewing said:

In general, use HDD for storing videos (You can save shadowplay and re-encoded files to SSD for a boost during the recording/re-encoding, but move the files to HDD afterwards) and use the SSD for games and bigger apps 

 
As for caching, at this point, I'm not even sure what you want to do. If you're going to buy a new SSD altogether, you're better off just using that for games directly rather than trying to cache stuff off the HDD. Caching is pretty much a "hack" that you do if you have no other option, and is also of little use if the drive being cached is not your boot drive.

Honestly, it's that moving videos to HDD ever so often that's been making me think of doing such a thing as caching. My idea is most of my recent videos are cached so I can still have the benefits of them being in the SSD, but also being left out when I'm done with them and working on newer files.

I am only considering getting a new SSD if I can't use just a partition of my boot drive for it. Otherwise, I can make do with my current setup.

[Acewing]

7 minutes ago, RaynbowDeath said:

Honestly, it's that moving videos to HDD ever so often that's been making me think of doing such a thing as caching. My idea is most of my recent videos are cached so I can still have the benefits of them being in the SSD, but also being left out when I'm done with them and working on newer files.

The general idea of caching is that it stores your most frequently used files and those files get read off the SSD rather than the HDD. I don't think your use case meshes well with that, though you can explore different types of caching software and see what they offer. I wouldn't personally recommend caching for this purpose in any case.