Cache or OS drive?

[gnuelxela]

I am using the asus p8z68-v/gen 3 board. Got a Crucial c300 64gb and a WD caviar black 1TB HDD.
i would like to know should i use the SSD as cache drive or as a OS drive? Which would i get a greater performance out of the 2 setups? Thanks

 

[GotNoRice]

Running on the SSD directly would be marginally faster, but with only 64GB to work with you're talking about only having enough room for your OS and maybe a few games and that's it. If any of those games are from Steam or Origin then you are talking about having to use ghetto hacks to move individual games away from your main steam/origin folder onto your SSD.

Using the SSD as cache means you don't have any space limitations to deal with nor do you have to do anything special for your games to benefit from the SSD. It's also incredibly efficient in making use of your SSD.

You might decide that the OS is worth it to put on your SSD but that still includes tons of random windows files that don't really need to be there. You might decide that you want one of your favorite games on your SSD, but that doesn't necessarily mean you really want every single map on the SSD or the entire single-player campaign loaded on the SSD, etc. With Intel's block-level caching only what you use gets cached, so even within individual apps, games, etc it's only caching what you use and not the entire app/game. With your OS it's only caching the parts that you use and not touching other stuff like help files or Spider Solitaire, etc that would otherwise just be wasting space on your SSD. It's even more granular than that, since it caches at the block level, not the file level, it can even cache part of a file. So if you have a 2GB texture file that you regularly use only a few hundred megs of, only a few hundred megs will be cached.

If you wanted to use your SSD directly, I think 64GB is too small honestly. Your OS will probably end up using half of that and the frustration of not being able to fit more than a few games max on top just isn't worth it.

From a functionality perspective, SSD caching would be almost like having a 1TB SSD.

 

[gnuelxela]

Thanks for the detail explanation GotNoRice.

I do understand that everyone recommends maybe having a 120GB SSD to be more optimal for OS drive. I did consider that too but I thought meh, not all games benefit from SSD speed so I was thinking putting all docs/games/apps onto the HDD and just win7 (and maybe at most only my fav game Football Manager) onto the SSD. Also, I don't do any video editing, just some PS and maybe writing a few apps, in which they can be done on the HDD. As a result, 64GB seems to be enough already.