SSD setup question: mobile lab

First, I'm sorry if this isn't the correct forum, but given the nature of the question, I think it's the appropriate one.

At work, I'm the LabTech RMM administrator for my company and two of our partners. As such, I'm going to be developing and testing a lot of automation scripts and procedures. This is going to require me to have a lab set up on my ThinkPad for testing (this is in addition to any virtual machines I keep around for the purposes of continuing education).

Right now, I have a 128GB mSATA SSD for the OS and a 256 SATA SSD for my data. Anything I'm not actively working with (pictures, documents, ISO files, music, etc) is archived to OneNote. I think that with using either linked clones in VMware Workstation or differencing disks in Hyper-V, I'll be okay with the 256GB SSD and will keep quite a bit of speed.

Alternatively, I can remove the 256GB SSD, install the factory 7200RPM 500GB HDD and use the 128GB SSD for caching purposes. I know it won't be as fast as having the 256GB SSD in place, but it should also give me 75% more storage (I'm not going to say it will double my storage, because I'd have to factor in the overhead for the OS) - from what I've read (FWIW), caching can benefit virtual machines, especially if I were to preload the reference virtual drive.

Thoughts?

 

Ask your company and two partners to each kick in $200 for you to buy a 1 TB SSD?

 

Good answer, but I doubt that's happening.
Sent from my Lumia 1520

 

Caching, HDD and other half solutions should not even be given a second thought.

This is for work? Buy a 1TB SSD and get it done.

 

If the 128GB mSATA is upgraded to at least 256GB, preferably 512GB, it would have the capacity to run the OS, programs, have space for virtual memory and leave some space unallocated (which helps maintain performance). This could then happily run alongside the HDD for data. 128GB SSDs usually have lower performance (particularly the write speeds) compared to the higher capacity members of the same family.

John

 

Right now, I'm using a 256GB SSD for data and is where I've been running my VMs. I'm not sure if I could go back to rotational speeds without some form of acceleration.

My 128GB mSATA does fine for the OS an applications - I don't run a lot of crap outside of Office, LabTech, ConnectWise, Notepad++, and AutoIt. I have about 74GB free out of 111GB (formatted capacity) right now, and that's with Windows managing the pagefile on C.