A couple of weeks later, Im quite satisfied with this drive.
1) RAM + cheaper 1TB HDD would still be cheaper. A SSD cache of 64GB for games are capable of launching at least 8 different games without a recurrence, and it is a cheaper solution as well. I know I don't play 8 different games in a day. Maybe 2-3 at the most.
You dont have to play 8 games in a day, just one that isnt on the drive. Every time you launch a game that isnt on the drive, it writes to the drive and removes whatever replaces it.
Let me put it this way: I have 129 games installed right now. With 8 on the SSD, that means I only need to launch one of the other 121 to cause an overwrite.
And yes, I can easily launch 8+ different games per day, especially when benchmarking, modifying them with patches/mods, and/or other testing. If I launch 8 and none of them are on the SSD, the entire SSD will have been overwritten.
3) I regularly do in fact run VM instances, burn discs, record TV, play a game, and recode movies at the same time on any given day, and I do at least 2-3 those tasks simultaneously on a very regular basis (let's say 80%+ of the time. Do I do this all the time? No, but I have the option to and I'd otherwise be waiting for a task to finish before I start another major task if I had a mechanical HDD when I do perform multiple tasks. I wouldn't have a SSD (because they're expensive) if I didn't get some real value out of owning one.
Burning a disc has nothing to do with SSD or HDD speed; the bottleneck there is the optical drive.
If youre recording TV or recoding big videos youll run out of space on a caching SSD if data-set is too big to be cached. Also youll overwrite your previously cached data for a workload that will probably be never repeated again, thereby gaining nothing by having that particular data cached.
VM instances have nothing to do with HDD usage unless youre constantly booting, paging and/or launching uncached applications in those sessions, in which case the solution is hibernate + more RAM.
Yours is an exaggerated scenario which isnt even bottlenecked by storage as much as you think it is, and a caching SSD wont benefit it as much as you think it will.
Just because you run multiple things at once, it does not mean its primarily I/O bound. I regularly multi-task as well, but my multi-tasking is not primarily I/O bound.
4) Unless you're pulling all the data from a dataset at the same time, a caching scheme still makes more sense. The job needing done in your case is launching games quickly, which doesn't meet this criteria.
Already answered in the first paragraph.
Not to mention that SSD caching only works on one Intel chipset, and results from other schemes can be flaky (some benchmarks Ive seen show results slower than just a single HDD by itself).
Also the entire system needs more administration than a single HDD.
Also, companies put products on the market all the time which have no business being there. They base the need for the product on past product success and forget to check if there is really a current job needing done (or if there is a better way to do the same job for cheaper) for the newer product.
Take a look at some of videos WDC has made; they interview some of the people who actually purchased the drives. These people often work with large datasets - too big, too write heavy, and too random to benefit from a small SSD.