So I have a spare SSD and want to give my HDDs are speed boost, how would I go about setting it up as a cache drive? all the online guides are for Intel smart cache.
Without using the Intel Smart cache there isn't really an easy way to do this under Windows. Microsoft have not ported the Windows Server functionality that permits you to create a single storage space with tiered drives - like OSX does.
One alternative is to use the SSD to hold games that you are currently playing, and the copying them back out and a new game in. This can be achieved by setting up some symbolic links to a folder on the SSD and your main games folder on the HDD. There have been a few utils created to help this process for steam libraries - here is one a quick google turns up: http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover
You could also mount the SSD to a folder on the HDD (or vice-versa) if you wanted to simplfy drive letters.
well I have a large enough SSD for all my important stuff, I just wanted to give me 8tb's of random HDDs a speed boost so to speak.
its a shame Microsoft hasn't implemented this functionality.....
Yes, it is. I had hoped that they would have ported the functionality from Server 2012 R2 into Windows 10 when they added a few more enhancements to storage-spaces - such as the ability to optimize after adding new drives.
The Power-Shell commands to do it are present in Windows 10, but when you execute them they fail telling you its unsupported when you try to create the storage-space from the storage-pool that contains the SSD and HDD's.
If you have Server 2012 R2 handy you can create a tiered storage pool there and then plug all the disks into a Win 8.1 or 10 system and import the storage pool - including the tiers.
The other work around (I have not tried this) )is if you are running Server 2012 R2 as a VM under Hyper-V in Win 8.1 or 10 you can create separate VHDX files on the SSD and HDD then create a tierd storage-pool within the VM. In theory you could then mount the tiered guest VHDX files under the host operating system - but it's all a bit long winded and I doubt it would actually work all that well - if at all.
yea that seems more effort than its worth, I just want an easy caching solution to utilize my spare SSD, oh well.
there are third parties that can do it. I think primocache/fancycache does it and if you buy old OCZ cache SSD you get free copy of the outdated Dataplex software. Some ramdisk software does it, but not everyone, don't quote me on this but I think superram something does it not 100% sure.
ohhh thanks, I'll check em out!
look into ready boost. i think it supports upto 16gb of space on a drive.
I used to have a SanDisk 32gb "ReadyCache" SSD that I used to cache a 2 TB HDD. It worked beautifully. My boot times were not improved at all when I went to an Intel SSD. It would also cache programs or games that I used all the time. The solution was software based. You should be able to simply purchase that software. Try googling "ReadyCache"