[Discuss] SSD caching

[Darren Duncan]

On 2015-03-27 1:56 PM, John Blomfield wrote:
> I guess there is not a lot of interest in this topic on this list; maybe because
> with the cost of SSD's dropping there is a trend for laptops to be built solely
> with an SSD and no Hard Drive and therefore no need for an SSD cache? This trend
> tends perhaps to make SSD caching to speed up HD performance redundant?

I agree.

Personally I made the switch starting 16 months ago from all-HDD to all-SSD. 
That is, prior to that, when I or my family got a new computer it had just an 
HDD in it, and afterwards, the computer had just an SSD in it.

I believe that SSDs are large enough for a small enough cost and have enough 
benefits that one is best to use it as their primary storage device on a new 
computer, and not just as a cache.  Getting HDDs today is then just when you 
want supplemental storage in large capacity, but not as the primary storage.

These days, SSDs of 256GB are very cheap, and larger ones are close to cheap, 
and that size is large enough for all the typical day to day application or 
document storage one needs.  If one does a lot of photos or videos and that 
isn't large enough (for photos it still often is), larger SSDs are still 
relatively inexpensive, or secondary HDDs can be used.

The days of having SSDs just as caches is over, buying a new machine that works 
this way is unreasonable.

-- Darren Duncan