Is it possible to use part of a SSD as cache for HDD?

[RogueTwo]

I just bought a Dell Inspiron 7580, which came with a 128GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. Windows 10 is installed on the SSD, and the HDD is uncached. What I would like to do is: split the SSD into a 100GB partition for the OS and a 28GB partition that would be used as cache for the slow HDD. Is it possible? BTW Intel RST is not on the latest version (apparently it hasn't been certified by Dell yet), and the "Accelerate" tab doesn't show.

UPDATE: I did briefly install the latest RST version to try it out, but still the "Accelerate" tab did not show, and I got a BSOD when coming back from suspension, which made me return to the latest version certified by Dell. Also, I forgot to mention that RAID support is activated on BIOS.

[n_scott_pearson · Accepted solution]

In the simplest of terms, if a system has support for caching via Optane, it will no longer have support for caching via SATA SSD (no support for Intel Smart Response Technology (SRT)). You can try running a pre-Optane release of Intel RST, but really Intel SRT should be considered a thing of the past. You can use an Optane module to accelerate the HDD - but lose the NVMe SSD in the process - or stick with the NVMe SSD and not have the HDD cached.

My take? I would get a significantly larger (and faster) NVMe SSD, so that you have the space for everything that needs fast disk I/O, and then treat the HDD as slower storage for files less often accessed.

Hope this helps,

...S

[RogueTwo]

Thanks @n.scott.pearson​ , that would explain why the "Accelerate" tab doesn't ever show up. I was hoping I could do something similar to what seems to be possible on Linux using LVM + dm-cache, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Your advice is more than reasonable, I will consider eventually upgrading SSD to a larger capacity (512GB is the largest size supported on the Inspiron 7580 AFAIK). For now, it's ok, Windows is eating up half of the SSD, I can live with that -- at least for a while.

Regards,

Andre