Intel’s SSD caching technology is a little less flashy—probably since it’s aimed at enthusiasts on a budget. Nevertheless, if you were previously stuck trying to figure out how to make the best use of a 40 GB SSD, this may end up being it. For around $200, you’re able to mate solid state storage to a beefy 1.5 TB magnetic repository in a tiered configuration that enjoys quantifiably-better read performance than a hard drive on its own.
Power users buying larger, faster SSDs will want to use them on their own, manually deciding where to put each application or piece of user data. After all, an SSD unencumbered by a disk is significantly faster. However, employing caching technology with practical roots in the enterprise world yields benefits on the desktop as well, particularly if you’re using the same applications and files over and over.
Of course, SSD caching has its limits. We didn’t see any real improvement in boot times and write-heavy tasks aren’t really going to speed up, since you’re synchronously writing to the solid state and hard drives.
