SSD for preview / cache files?

I'm sure people are. The Scratch drive doesn't need to be all that large (compared to the Media drive), so SSDs are a good option.
 
Hmmm.... How do you think I should set up my system? Here's why I'm still unsure, I have:

iMac with Fusion 3TB drive (Read 270MB/s write 402MB/s) has my programs
Lacie 20TB Thunderbolt 2 (iMac only has thunderbolt 1) (Read 756MB/s write 539MB/s) has my footage
Lacie Thunderbolt 500GB SSD (Read 267MB/s write 385MB/s)

So the SSD is actually my slowest drive! I tried to put video and audio previews and the Premiere cache disks on the SSD but I have to say I didn't notice any performance boost at all... If anything when preview files are set to the Raid disks they do render about 20% faster.
 
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Ah, well that's different. Usually when talking about an SSD versus a hard drive, you don't mean a slow external SSD versus a massive hyper-fast RAID array! "SSD verus HD" is normally about internal drives, which is what I have, and in that case a decent SSD makes a big difference. A single-spindle hard drive (i.e. plain old HD) is much slower than an SSD, but a RAID array can be a lot faster (depending on how it's set up).

In your situation, as you say, the SSD is your slowest drive, so putting cache etc. there will just slow you down.

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Just to clarify... the big issue for conventional HDs is the seek time. The throughput numbers you quoted only happen AFTER the HD has found the data, which takes a while. For SSDs, seek time is basically zero, which is where they get most of their speed gain. So don't just look at those throughput numbers.

However, in a big RAID array, one drive can be spewing out data while all the other drives are seeking; so that considerably changes things in favour of the RAID.

Bottom line, you found that the SSD didn't give you a noticeable improvement, and I think that's your answer.
 
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