Using an SSD as drive cache for a non-boot drive

[Kusnierek]

Hello there. I recently purchased a new Plextor M3 256GB, planning on wiping ssytem and installing a clean Windows 7 OS to get ready for the Windows 8 upgrade coming out soon.

Right now I'm using a pair of 60GB OCZ Agility drives in RAID 0 for my OS, and a 2TB Samsung HDD for storing music, videos, and my Steam game files. I'm planning on swapping out the two 60GB OCZ Agility SSDs with the 256GB Plextor, and therefore I'll have no use for my OCZ Agility drives anymore. In RAID 0 without TRIM support they weren't that fast anyway.

So I'm wondering if I can keep one 60GB drive in, wipe it clean, and set it up as a SSD cache for the 2TB drive, especially to help speed up my Steam games load times, etc. I know this can be done in tandem normally, on a system that ONLY has a cache drive and a storage drive, but I don't know how to go about doing it on a system with a stand-alone 256GB SSD for the OS and programs and stuff.

From everything I've read, using an SSD for caching is generally done when the OS is installed between those two drives, and not when I just want to speed up a storage drive. Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks a lot!

My system:

AMD Phenom II X4 965 (BE) 3.4GHz
GIGABYTE GA-790XTA-UD4 AM3 AMD 790X ATX motherboard
4x4GB G.Skill Ripjaw 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM
2x60GB OCZ Agility Series OCZSSD2-1AGT60G SATA 3.0Gb/s SSDs in RAID (To be replaced with 256GB Plextor M3)
SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
ASUS Radeon HD 5970 2GB 512 (256 x 2)-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 video card
ASUS Xonar Essence STX PCI-E x1 sound card
SILVERSTONE OP1000-E 1000W ATX power supply
NZXT Whisper chassis

 

[Phynaz]

You can cache any drive you want. Unfortunately, because you aren't running Intel, y0ou will have to purchase caching software.

 

[Kusnierek]

Isn't FancyCache a free beta download? Or will that not work on an AMD system?

 

[Phynaz]

Thanks a RAM cache.

 

[greenhawk]

Isn't FancyCache a free beta download?

it will work, but SSD support is basically not used from what I have read. It is still at the RAM caching stage. SSDs are starting to be supported, but the biggest reason not to use them is that the data is not considered valid on reboot, so the SSD is re-loaded with cached files as they are accessed all over again (just like RAM).

 

[Kusnierek]

Ahh, I see. So there is no intuitive (free) way for me to do this without switching to an Intel system?

 

[Phynaz]

Not that I'm aware of.