I don't know if it would give you the speed boost you're looking for. That being said, if you're using something like Steam, you can move files between drives on command. So if there's a particular game you're playing for a while, you could move that to your SSD and then move it back to your HDD when you move on to something else.

10-15 years ago, Apple had a product built around this concept, the Fusion Drive. It was one physical device containing both types of storage that appeared to the user as a single drive. The OS would decide what files when on which storage medium based on usage. Unfortunately, it’s been long enough that they went to all SSDs all of the time that Apple is removing support for it in this year’s OS release.

Haven't heard about anybody doing it for a long time. Nowadays flash drivers are big, so people just use them for the fast parts and disks for what can be slow.

I'd use flash for storing the main system, and mount the disk in a directory where you will keep the large media, probably as a subdir of your home.

yep this is a thing in zfs

Yes absolutely!

You can set it up with LVM. It's not exactly hard, but you do need to be able to follow a guide and have an understanding of drives. See https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/logical_volume_manager_administration/lvm_cache_volume_creation for example.

I think it is still a thing, but I dont know if this is the right application for it. IIRC the benefit comes when storing lots of data as the SSD acts like a buffer to quickly store data while it slowly transfers to the HDD. For gaming, you'll still need to be reading from the HDD in real time meaning the SSD isn't going to be helping much. Furthermore, your 8TB drive might already have a decently large cache on it which does the same thing.

new ssds (the nvme ones) can only be overwritten between 100 and 600 or so times. if u use it as a cache ur gonna burn through the drive very soon

look for the tbw rating (terabits written )

I do this with my ZFS pools

My Synology has 2x nvme drive specific for cache. You can't even use it as part of your pool unless you ssh in and do it manually.

I use one for cache and the other as part of my pool so my Immich thumbnails load and database fast.

i have small ssd and larger hdd on debian and play a few games on it. the games are 30-50+gb ea. they stay on the hdd with the wine files (prefixes/runners). i'm not gonna move that crap around constantly just to play, and i can then use btrfs on ssd more easily. no need to worry about disabling cow on certain game directories, or making different subvols so snapshots aren't massive.

I believe windows 11 is kinda meant to do this automatically now, which is partly why it uses so much ram when you haven't even launched anything yet...

It seems quite bad at it however.

This tool is meant to help diagnose issues with it, but I've not been able to try it, as the windows 11 machine I use is pwnd by my IT department and their antivirus blocks it from running 😅:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/rammap

Not for gaming so much after ssds got big and cheap, but on NAS Operating Systems like Unraid and TrueNAS, (and likely others) you have a pool of hard drives that do big data storage. Like you pointed out IO is slow. So to speed things up you have an ssd setup as cache. Typically you have the programs you have running are running off that ssd cache. It does IO to the ssd and you setup a slow scheduled replication to the hdd pool.

Sure if your bios supports it.