Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote
John Rumm wrote
SteveW wrote

I've recently fitted an SSD Cache. The SSD connects as a normal HDD and
indeed can function as one, but this is not recommended. It comes with a
licence for a piece of software (for Windows 7) which over the course of
a couple of reboots and time running, learns which files should be
cached and uses the SSD to serve them up. It gives a significant speed
boost without sacrificing the large capacity of a HDD.

There are also hybrid SSD / HDD drives out there like the Seagate
Momentus.
Includes SSD acceleration / caching in the same package as the hard
drive.

Having benchmarked them and used a 500gig Momentus XT for
quite a while, they're about twice as fast in practice as a normal 2.5"
7200rpm. Which means they're about the same speed as a 3.5" 7200rpm...

A nice upgrade from a cheesy 120gig 5400rpm Fujitsu in a laptop for
sure, but very second rate indeed when compared to an SSD for speed.

As Daniel says, it's all down to what you consider important and how
big your base dataset is. Being of a 'filer' disposition, I've got a
4Tb NAS that has most of the junk neatly arranged on it, so all my
machines could get by on 120gig SSDs or smaller without squeezing.
They actually have 240gig SSDs (Vertex 3) because I was quite flush
for a time!

And they absolutely *fly*, it's quite startling the difference you
get. Better than double the CPU speed or number of cores; better than
doubling the RAM; better than doubling the GPU tps. Which shouldn't be
a surprise - with a decent SATA3 SSD you're getting x4 or x5 what a decent
3.5" HD will manage in raw speed, and far faster than that for small
files.

Booting up in 6 seconds is an amusing party trick, given that modern
OSes generally only need to be rebooted for patching, but the speed
that makes that happen continues for everything else you do too.

But with some styles of use like with keeping the apps that you use
even weekly open all the time, and a 64bit OS and lots of physical
ram like 8GB or more, and only rebooting for updates, the difference
isnt very dramatic at all and I'd rather use the mature technology
instead myself.