Conclusions

My motivation for writing this article stemmed from complaints from friends and readers who didn’t want to make the leap to an SSD due to the cost of drives that have sufficient capacity to run all their programs from. For some people, moving files back and forth from a small SSD isn’t too much of a hassle, but many find it to be a waste of time. And when you have to run most programs from a mechanical drive, what’s the point of even having an SSD?

After looking at our test results, I think it’s pretty clear that if you only want to spend around $50-100 on an SSD, caching is the way to go. In my experience, commonly used programs and data gets send to the SSD efficiently (and it’s even better if you are installing onto a cached drive rather than adding a cache later).

Alternatively, you could buy a 50 or 64GB drive and use that as a cache. This won’t be as fast as a 128GB with 50% over-provisioning, but it is easily the best $50 you’ll ever spend on your PC. In fact I would say that if you have an Intel board that supports Smart Response, there is no reason not to use it at this point. Get yourself an SSD – anything from a 32GB to a 128GB, and make use of caching today. You will never want to go back to a mechanical drive.

If you are already using a small SSD as your main drive, and still running programs off a mechanical drive, it is still worthwhile to get a second SSD and use that to cache the mechanical drive. I think we’re at the point now where small SSDs are cheap enough that everyone should have an SSD cache.
http://www.hardcoreware.net/ssd-cache-performance/4/