120GB SSD System drive or 60gb Cache drive?

[Stevieboyfitzy]

Hi Hexus,

I am new to the forums and would like to here what you guys feel is the best way forward with my new HTPC build, as the title says my options are a fast 120gb boot drive with everything else, movies, music TV stuff on a few gig storage drives, or would I benefit more if I was to buy a cache drive, Corsair, Crucial or OCZ with dataplex software setup caching the most used programs from my storage drive? few good offers around at the minute with SSDs so any help appreciated.

Cheers

[Stevieboyfitzy]

I decided to go with the scandisk extreme 120gb on offer at the moment with scan as my operating system install drive and use a mechanical drive for storage, after a short think about it as I would one day maybes need to add extra storage once the mechanical drives start to fill up, as far as I remember reading somewhere I would not of been able to benefit from the SSD cache with any further drive additions due to the fact you can only cache one mechanical drive, I would still like to here from anyone who has built an HTPC using a cache drive and let me know what type of benefits they seem to feel going down the cache drive route.

[Samwood]

Good choice, cache drives only work for certain types of usage.

Think of them this way: a HDD + 60GB cache will store the 60GB of most used data on the SSD, and the rest on the HDD. But because of the cache controller (that manages where the data comes & goes) you will never experience 100% SSD speeds.

A 120GB boot drive means YOU can control exactly what you want fast access to. For a HTPC, OS and programs should be enough. Media files do not require fast load speeds (unless they are extremely high-res pictures or video editing), so these can be stored on a large HDD or streamed from the internet.

If you want to add storage in the future, you can theoretically use a single SSD as cache for 2+ HDDs, but it can be complicated and limits on how you can do it (specialist SSD/HDD caching hardware is usually limited to single HDDs, e.g. http://www.scan.co.uk/products/silve...formance-by-70).
But again its not really going to make a real difference to your speeds.
I would suggest RAID0 if you want to expand your storage capacity and increase speed, though it does increase your chances of data loss (so make backups).

[Stevieboyfitzy]

Thanks for your input Samwood, I already use an Intel SSD as the boot drive on my main PC, OS and the odd game or two, since purchasing my first SSD a few months back (paid more than double the price of 120gb SSDs today) my whole system felt a lot snappier and more responsive including pretty impressive load times, I think I already knew the best way forward but it is nice to here other users thoughts, especially if they have attempted the Cache drive route, I have read quite a bit stuff about using cache drives with mechanical drives and most of what was said was decent, but this was a few months ago when purchasing 120gb+ SSDs was still an expensive route to go down.

Cheers for your reply.