[Discuss] SSD caching

[John Blomfield]

I have an ASUS s56c laptop with a 750GB Hard Drive and a 24GB SSD cache 
that dual boots Windows and OpenSuse 12.3. Its used mainly by my wife 
and I haven't paid much attention to until recently when I upgraded 
OpenSuse to 13.1. We need to keep Windows for very very occasionally 
used programs. However, I noticed that the laptop had an 24GB SSD drive 
which is presumably used by Windows. The SSD is partitioned according to 
GParted like this:

sdb1    16GB, file system "unrecognized", label "HFS"
sdb2    6GB, file system "ntfs", label "IntelRST"

Now it would seem IntelRST refers to Intel's caching software and HFS 
may refer to Apple's Mac file system? Perhaps GParted is not able to 
read an HFS file system? However, I don't know why a Mac file system 
would be on this computer?

I would like to make use of this 24GB of SSD in some way with the 
OpenSuse installation. My options seem to be:

a) If the 16GB HFS partition is not used by Windows I could format it 
ext4 and figure out how to use Linux's Bcache software.
b) Same as above, use BCache but format the whole of the 24GB ext4 and 
hope that this does not break Windows.
c) Install OpenSuse 13.1 on the whole 24GB of SSD, which is more than 
enough for my OS with a separate Home directory on the Hard Drive. Again 
assuming this will not break Windows.

My questions are if I format the SSD, will this break Windows or will it 
just run slower without a cache?
Is there any benefit from running BCache on an SSD compared to putting 
the whole OS all on an SSD?
What do you think the HFS partition is for?

Thanks John

-- 
John Blomfield
Delivered by Thunderbird Email on Linux OpenSuse-KDE4