TR Forums

My upcoming plan is to have an SSD be used for the boot drive, and then install Steam and all of my games on a HDD. I was wondering if I could use 60-80GB of flash drives as a Ready Boost for the HDD (or some sort of a DIY hybrid drive)?

Alternatively, would it be suboptimal to have the HDD + flash drives be the boot drive and the SDD for all other programs?

At least how it was originally designed for Vista and Win 7, Readyboost was intended to only work on the primary drive (the system drive with Windows on it) and disables itself if that is a SSD (that is, the WEI disk score is over 5.9).

It may well work if the SSD is a secondary drive, but performance under SuperFetch and Readyboost-accelerated HDD was noticeably worse than just a HDD under XP, so it would be much worse than just using the SSD.

Windows also caches the disk using any currently unused RAM which is 1000x faster than USB, and that explains why most people never noticed any difference with Readyboost.

SSDs are phenomenally cheap right now. Just buy a 1TB SATA SSD and get on with your life!

bfg-9000 wrote:

At least how it was originally designed for Vista and Win 7, Readyboost was intended to only work on the primary drive (the system drive with Windows on it) and disables itself if that is a SSD (that is, the WEI disk score is over 5.9).

It may well work if the SSD is a secondary drive, but performance under SuperFetch and Readyboost-accelerated HDD was noticeably worse than just a HDD under XP, so it would be much worse than just using the SSD.

Windows also caches the disk using any currently unused RAM which is 1000x faster than USB, and that explains why most people never noticed any difference with Readyboost.

I presume 16GB of RAM would be enough for caching 160-500GB of HDD capacity?

I also heard about people setting up SSDs as cache for HDDs, aka hybrid drive setup, using Intel RST. Does AMD have any equivalent software? I could find some old 64 or 128GB SSD in the future.

NTMBK wrote:

SSDs are phenomenally cheap right now. Just buy a 1TB SATA SSD and get on with your life!

I'm going for a super value gaming build and while I can put everything on the 256GB SSD for now, it may not be enough in the future. There are more used or scavenged parts than actual new ones in the planned rig that I posted about it elsewhere.

Ready Boost was designed for systems with very little RAM, 1 GB or 2 GB. It won't be useful on a system with 16 GB of RAM.

Every time Intel comes out with another iteration of such technology, there are suddenly many questions afterwards about what you can do with a very small SSD--because no perceivable benefit can be noticed. Perhaps detectable in benchmarks (which invariably are run with the minimum possible RAM and a HDD in reviews to show the technology at its best), but not felt.

This happened with Intel Turbo Memory using 2-4GB mini-PCIe cards, Intel Smart Response Technology with 20-64GB SSDs, and now Intel Optane/3D XPoint 16-32GB M.2 NVMe modules

UnfriendlyFire wrote:

I presume 16GB of RAM would be enough for caching 160-500GB of HDD capacity?

That would depend entirely on how much of that 16GB is normally occupied by programs. Only otherwise unused RAM is available for disk cacheing.

UnfriendlyFire wrote:

Does AMD have any equivalent software?

Yep, AMD StoreMI version of FuzeDrive works with any X399, 400 or 500-series chipset (presumably you could buy FuzeDrive for other Ryzen chipsets). Or many SSD manufacturers have their own RAM cacheing software that won't work with HDD, including Samsung Magician's RAPID mode or Sandisk's ReadyCache version of ExpressCache. As with Windows' own cacheing, they cut the usual response time of SSD from ~0.1ms to ~0.0001ms for things in the cache. The Windows implementation works well though, plus has the added benefit of being able to free up the RAM for programs if it is ever needed, and on HDD too.

Note that a 256GB SSD is not sufficient to hold even one game: Gears of War 4 + all DLC is a 350GB install. Just the big update itself was a 248GB download, larger than the formatted capacity of a 256GB SSD. And while AMD StoreMI would be free for your B450 chipset, using a 256GB SSD to cache a 500GB HDD does seem kind of silly. Fortunately it can (unlike Intel) be set as a JBOD where your most frequently used files are automatically moved to the SSD and the whole array is seen as a 750GB C:\ drive, sufficient to hold at least a few games. I probably wouldn't use the RAM cache part though.