Decided to give my aged 6 years old (well it will be in May) system an upgrade. I really thought about replacing the drive with an SSD, but didn’t wan’t to go through the hassle of disk-copy or even installing a new OS and then re-installing all my programs. Did some research and found out about PrimoCache. There’s several programs similar to PrimoCache (not going to mention them; others can if they like), but this program’s like the Cadillac of them all if you ask me. I waited and read all I could over a period of several weeks before deciding to bite the bullet. I purchased a Hynix Gold 256G SSD (had great reviews and was under $50 (well after tax a bit over $50) from Amazon. Great HD so far. I then installed PrimoCache. They give you a 30 day free trial, but after just a few hours, I said, to myself, this program actually does what they said it would do and paid the $29.95 for it. Not going to break the bank. Anyway, file access time’s at least 3 times faster on my machine now, and I literally installed the HD and program and was up and running within 20 minutes tops (more like 12 to 15 minutes but I wasn’t using a stop watch). The biggest problem was blowing out all the dust. lolololololol
Great thing about using the SSD as a cache drive is, if it fails, it won’t harm your HDD at all. Many other advantages to using PrimoCache with SDD but I’ll let you all do your own homework for that info, but will add that if you have a MB that supports the faster SSDs, you can actually use Optane cache drives with AMD and I’ll argue that it PrimoCache is better than any implementation from Intel (from reading and watching videos from sources such as Linus Tech Tips).
Boot time’s also noticeably faster. May not be SSD fast, but I just wanted to milk my system for another 4 years if possible (again it’s already 6 years old) and by then, who knows what the state of PCs will be like then. Very surprised, after doing a forum search, that no one’s mentioned PrimoCache before here since it’s been around for a long time (formally it was called FancyCache). Maybe Fred or someone else here at AskWoody might do an actual technical review. I can only tell you my HDD barely giggles now (no thrashing at all anymore; barely even hear it now). Programs, like the GIMP (since I do computer art) definitely now launches faster and again, I don’t hear my HD anymore so it’s either re-launching from L1 cache or the L2 cache (i.e, SSD); I have no clue. lol. Even my VMs (I use a VM as a sandbox) don’t thrash as I run them. Programs (mainly browsers; use MyPal) launch faster and browsing from different sites appear quicker.
Anyway, I ended up re-formatting my new SSD, since, to 2 drives. For my needs, a 32G partition appears to be good enough for PrimoCache (since I’m not gamer) so actually using the rest of the 256Gs for a backup drive and finally addressing the Window nag of me setting up a background backup system. Windows has already written 76Gs of data to that partition (and I didn’t allow it to back up certain directories since it would fill the partition to the brim if I did so; lol).
Final note; I also decided to upgrade my 12Gs to 28Gs so I purchased 2 used 8Gs (matching at least I hope they are, but they are used) from Amazon for around $56 after the dust settles. Hopefully it will be here mid-week and I’m looking forward to increase L1 Cache even more (right now I noticed, with what my system requires, I can only use 3Gs of RAM for L1; going to go to 12Gs once my new sticks get in. Probably won’t hear my HD all, then). All-in-all, I spent under $130 and at least doubled my perceived speed (some things quadrupled) with respect to file access. Definitely was worth the money to me. Should have done what I did years ago. lol
Will continue to use hibernate though, since I tend to keep programs running between power offs and I don’t like my system on all the time (yes; I know the arguments about always leaving system up or not; at least, virtually, I keep my system on via Hibernate). Not really concerned with SSD longevity as far as wear and tear but you can also all but eliminate that too but setting the PrimoCache slider to read only; I left read/write active (80% read and 20% write) for faster response. To each his/her own. Below’s the link to their site. If that is not allowed here, I’ll remove it or the Ops can. 
