SSD Caching.....

[Raintitan]

Hey everyone, I'm mainly a lurker but I wanted to drop a post regarding SSD caching.

I've wanted an SSD system but really didn't want to spend the money on half to a full terabyte on SSD storage. Really I like to have a ton of Steam games installed even if I'm only playing 3-4 at a time in a regular time window.

Anyway, I recently grabbed an SSD caching drive which essentially keeps track of files and applications you use most and runs them off an SSD. My system boot times went from over a minute to about 15 seconds. Games I play frequently, like Skyrim and BF3, load in about 15-20 second easily. It offers a huge performance leap for the price.

I grabbed an OCZ Synapse 64 GB drive, and there are other options depending on your MB as well as some drives coming from Crucial real soon too. Search for reviews and you will find what tech sites have said which is the good experience I've had.

As I said, I don't contribute much but my experience has been so profound after over a decade of PC building that I had to point it out to people who can't afford SSD or want to deal with a reformat.

R

[leo8877]

SSD has been the best computer performance upgrade I've ever had.  It's ridiculous how awesome they are.

[Turtle]

Thanks for the tip, I was considering this a long time ago and then forgot about it. Nice to hear some personal experiences on this as well.

[Misguided]

I covered the use of Intel's SRT technology for caching in a fair bit of detail in my recent build thread.