trying to get my head round how l1 and l2 work. I understand l1 uses ram and l2 uses disk. What i dont get is how and when to use them together and separately. I assume that if im using l1 for an ssd then l2 cache is pointless since it wont be any quicker than the ssd?
I understand if im trying to cache for a mechanical hard drive then using an ssd as l2 cache is going to speed it up for cache hits. But can and should l1 be used also for a mechanical hard drive? My head is saying use ssd as l2 and ram as l1 for that sdd. is this correct?
Or maybe simpler, if i have plenty of ram (32 gigs and normally 25 gigs unused) and one spare 128 gig ssd what would be the best setup for the following?
computer has 3 ssds in use and 3 mechanical hard drives. I have an additional 128 gig ssd spare (for cache)
Currently im using 14 gigs ram as l1 for the three ssd's. Now trying to understand how to setup the 3 mechanical drives.
thanks.
trying to understand l1 with l2
Re: trying to understand l1 with l2
Yes, L2 cache on an SSD is pointless. L1 on an SSD is like fueling up your Lamborghini with rocketfuel 
Especially on repeated disk-intensive operations like gaming and some photo-editing this can be very helpful. So you could allocate the most RAM to the drives on which your games, or images, or ... are stored. All depends on how you use your system.
L2 comes in handy whenever you want to read as fast from a mechanical HDD as from an SSD. So if you only use your HDD's to store your movies, it's pretty pointless. But since 128GB is a pretty big cache, you might as well use it. You could add some L1 to the mix, but only when you need those really fast IOPS, like gaming or image editing.
Especially on repeated disk-intensive operations like gaming and some photo-editing this can be very helpful. So you could allocate the most RAM to the drives on which your games, or images, or ... are stored. All depends on how you use your system.L2 comes in handy whenever you want to read as fast from a mechanical HDD as from an SSD. So if you only use your HDD's to store your movies, it's pretty pointless. But since 128GB is a pretty big cache, you might as well use it. You could add some L1 to the mix, but only when you need those really fast IOPS, like gaming or image editing.