jay

Very interesting read, with the costs of SSD dropping I wonder if this is the best way to get what you want... ( I too believe that storage spaces needs another generation before I will trust it, and everything I hear from peers is the same) SSD caching is becoming a building block in the typical SAN pool. But in those cases we use banks of drives, not a single drive to be at the head of it. I would be really concerned that if it is reading and writing everything going into a large pool and it was a sole source of any data. If the SSD was literally treated as a cache and was written out to disk than I think it would be fine.. that way the worst that would happen is you burn the drive, SSD drives are a still a bit on the new side to me and the industry, next year when SATA express comes out I think there will be a resurgence in interest as the pipe will double. I do agree that having a way to mix SSD drives into the Stablebit platform would be good. It would be golden if you could tag things programmatically... So movies which get watched regularly (or a game you want to play) is moved to the cache and lives there with a real copy on the HD's... then the HDs can spin down. So you get the best of both worlds in that way. Just as an aside, perhaps another thing to consider for your would be to optimize the space you are using on you SSD via MS Dedup, I am really wishing Stablebit supported this.(but I am not 100% sure I would trust it to use it against my 12TB Pool, yet) You could see your potiential savings if you have your gaming stuff on a separate drive using (DDPEval.exe) http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/05/21/introduction-to-data-deduplication-in-windows-server-2012.aspx I don't game as much as I do virtual work, so on my win8.1 box I have 10 virtual machines running in 87gigs of real space (~200 gigs of duped space), there are alot of same files, in things like virtual machines. But I am not sure how much savings you would get with games.. I put my 30G steam directory in it, but I need to find a way to calculate it (the tools only do whole drives) r j