When solid-state drives first broke into the consumer market, there were those who predicted the new storage format would supplant hard drives in a matter of years thanks to radically improved performance. In reality, the shift from hard drives (HDDs) to SSDs has thus far been confined to the upper end of the PC market. For cost-conscious buyers and OEMs, the higher performance they offer is still too expensive and the total capacity is insufficient. If you don’t create much data or install many programs, a 128GB SSD may be perfect for your needs. People who work with large projects or file archives, however, can’t always downsize gracefully. If the entire point of upgrading was to improve data access rather than boot/launch times, than using a secondary hard drive for data storage defeats the purpose of the SSD.

SSD cache drives have emerged as a means of addressing this gap. They are small, typically containing between 20-60GB of NAND flash and are paired with a standard hard drive. Once installed, drivers monitor which applications and files are accessed most often, then cache those files on the SSD. It can take the software 1-2 runs to start caching data, but once this process is complete, future access and boot times are significantly enhanced.

In theory, this type of solution offers the best of both worlds. Intel began offering its own caching software when it released the Z68 chipset in 2011 — and, leveraging Nvelo’s Dataplex software, Corsair, Crucial, Mushkin, and OCZ have all launched cache drives of their own. We’ve tested both solutions head-to-head in order to answer three questions:

What type of performance boost can users expect from an SSD cache drive? How do the Dataplex and Intel solutions perform head to head, and what are the salient characteristics of each? Is overall performance improved by using a faster mechanical HDD?

If you’re curious about a cache drive, I highly recommend not skipping the next page. Dataplex and Intel Smart Response Technology (hereafter abbreviated SRT) are not perfect substitutes for one another. They aim to accomplish the same goal, but have very different restrictions and capabilities. Depending on the age of your system, you may have only one option.

Next page: Dataplex vs. Intel SRT… fight!