I have one of these SSDs; it's a very good drive that would make a great cache disk.  $259 and free shipping at Rakuten.com.  Lowest price (very low as they have been going for $300-350 lately) I have seen for this drive introduced earlier this year.

 

http://www.rakuten.com/prod/crucial-m500-480gb-2-5-sata-iii-solid-state-drive-ssd/248700836.html?ListingID=292644526&scid=em_20131129_BlackFriday2&adid=18007

I have one of these SSDs; it's a very good drive that would make a great cache disk.  $259 and free shipping at Rakuten.com.  Lowest price (very low as they have been going for $300-350 lately) I have seen for this drive introduced earlier this year.

 

http://www.rakuten.com/prod/crucial-m500-480gb-2-5-sata-iii-solid-state-drive-ssd/248700836.html?ListingID=292644526&scid=em_20131129_BlackFriday2&adid=18007

 

is it worth spending that much on a cache. i'm getting > 100MByte/sec to a 5900 RPM drive, so we're approaching wire speed on Ethernet. Unless you have multiple network adapters AND the CPU could keep them going full tilt, I wouldn't think you'd see much benefit

If you are getting those write speeds, perhaps an SSD will not give you much benefit.  I have one because it is a *a lot* faster for me than was my mechanical drive; especially when doing a large number of small files writes.  I have apps installed on my cache drive as well and a Windows partition for updating the MB BIOS.

If you are getting those write speeds, perhaps an SSD will not give you much benefit.  I have one because it is a *a lot* faster for me than was my mechanical drive; especially when doing a large number of small files writes.  I have apps installed on my cache drive as well and a Windows partition for updating the MB BIOS.

 

That may be it then. i'm copying ISO's and MKV's

I think the benefit you might see depends very much on your usage.  If you're writing to the system frequently enough that most writes don't require a drive spinup, then the zero "spinup" time for an SSD isn't much of a benefit.

 

As for the transfer rate => a modern 1TB/platter drive can easily write (at least on the outer cylinders) faster than a maxed Gb network.    So if you're writing across your network, whether the destination is an SSD or a rotating platter drive with 1TB platters will make very little difference.

 

I think the biggest benefit of an SSD cache drive is for those who run applications on their server that consistently access their data => they can be set up with the SSD cache as their data drive, and you won't have a drive spinning all the time.

 

Notwithstanding that, this is a VERY good price for a 480GB SSD ... even more attractive to me because it's from Crucial (the only SSDs I buy are Intel & Crucial).