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Cache drive on RAID-0?

J

Jeremy C

Gawd
Joined
Sep 13, 2009
Messages
819
Just wondering if this would be more hassle than it's worth. After upgrading I have an 80GB X25-M sitting on my desk, and was thinking of adding it as a cache drive to my RAID setup. The only issue I can see is that the SSD would have slower sequential read that the RAID, which could potentially slow it down. Obviously IOPS and random seek is going to favor the SSD by a huge margin, but will the read/write performance hurt the speed of the RAID?

Also, my other option was just break the raid and use one HDD + cache drive. The SSD would be an almost exact match in speed to the single HDD, but with the SSD speed boosts.

Since this drive is being used only for Steam and nothing else, do you think this would be the better option? I've been trying to find a decent answer via search but have had no luck. I'd rather not have to test out each method and reinstall Steam multiple times (though I just might to see how each works).
 
I run a similar setup with two 1TB WD Caviar Black drives in Raid:0 with a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro. Half of the SSD is used as Cache for the raid:0 setup, since 64GB is the max cache size. I use the remaining space to run a few games directly off the SSD.

The setup is absolutely fantastic. The speed is very close to running from the SSD directly for stuff that you frequently access.

In my case, I boot from the cached drives. I booted from the SSD directly at one point but decided that I simply needed more space. I went with the two WD Caviar black drives in Raid:0 because I wanted even stuff that wasn't cached to still be reasonably fast. It met all of my expectations and beyond. Every 6 months or so I disable caching so I can defrag my hard drives. That is when it's really easy to notice the difference. The first boot after I re-enable caching (when nothing is cached yet) my computer takes several minutes to boot, including after windows boots, just waiting for the rest of the system tray programs to load. On the 2nd reboot, it's all over in <15 seconds.

You are worried that your SSD is going to hinder the read speed of your raid:0 setup. That simply will not be the case in real life. The only time you will see near max theoretical read speed with a mechanical drive is when transferring large contiguous files. Once the drive has to do any seeking whatsoever your read speed is going to go down the drain. So unless you're only worried about the transfer speed of huge files, the SSD will represent an improvement in every area, even read speed.

Even if you do regularly deal with large files, keep in mind that the caching works on the block level, not the file level. If you have a 6GB file but only access a 200MB chunk of that file on a regular basis, only the blocks that hold that 200MB of data are going to be cached, not the entire file. It's very efficient.
 
I'm wondering somewhat same thing. Currently I use SSD as OS disk and RAID0 3x1TB array for games. I wonder if I should try accelerating that array instead and have os in it too. Or keep os on ssd and use the minimum allowed size as cache. I'm not sure if it's even possible to do any of that and I can't test since I do not have access to my PC and checking out stuff with phone is a bit tedious. But when I get back, it would be interesting to try out.
 
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