What exactly will this 16GB SSD do for me? Y580

[kandon]

Well I recently purchased a Lenovo Y580 laptop:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834310661


As you can see, it comes with a 16gb SSD. I was wondering, what exactly will this be used for? All I'm really interested in is faster boot/wake up times, I don't really need it to use any programs, but will it do that?

I heard that it is a cache drive, and it "learns" what you use most and speeds that up. But all I really want is the OS to boot up faster and wake ups to be faster.

Is it a hybrid drive, where the drives are together? Or are they separate and the OS is installed on the SSD?

I would really like some help with this guys.

Thanks.


I apologize for posting this in multiple sections. I just really want this question answered.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Well, it's too small to put your OS on. windows 7 takes a minimum of ~15gig which would leave no room for programs.

Lenovo may have set this up as a caching drive as I can't really see 16 gig being used for storage either. My music and pictures alone exceed 1TB. looking at the specs on their web site, it's definately caching. I'd leave it as is.

 

[kandon]

Well, it's too small to put your OS on. windows 7 takes a minimum of ~15gig which would leave no room for programs.

Lenovo may have set this up as a caching drive as I can't really see 16 gig being used for storage either. My music and pictures alone exceed 1TB. looking at the specs on their web site, it's definately caching. I'd leave it as is.

That's sort of the thing. As much as I've looked at it I STILL don't really know what caching means. Does that somewhat speed up my booting since it's one of my most used things?

 

[maestro0428]

Caching is when information is stored for later use. It will store your most used data so that it is quicker at accessing it. That's the simplest way to look at it I think.

 

[kandon]

Caching is when information is stored for later use. It will store your most used data so that it is quicker at accessing it. That's the simplest way to look at it I think.

Does that include boot times + wakeup times as well?

 

[Hawkeye22]

I don't know if it will speed up waking from sleep since ram is kept refreshed while in sleep mode. This is what makes sleep so fast to wake up. Hibernate on the other hand saves it's state to disk then powers down. It must reload it's state on wake. I can see a caching drive helping with this. Also, some OS's like win7 are aware of caching drives and I believe will try to keep it's boot files in cache.

Anyhow, I'm sure a caching drive will increase performance in certain areas. by how much, I don't know. You would need to check some web sites for performance statistics.

 

[kandon]

I don't know if it will speed up waking from sleep since ram is kept refreshed while in sleep mode. This is what makes sleep so fast to wake up. Hibernate on the other hand saves it's state to disk then powers down. It must reload it's state on wake. I can see a caching drive helping with this. Also, some OS's like win7 are aware of caching drives and I believe will try to keep it's boot files in cache.

Anyhow, I'm sure a caching drive will increase performance in certain areas. by how much, I don't know. You would need to check some web sites for performance statistics.

Well I'm guessing the "sleep" is when you just pull the laptops screen down. So basically what you're saying is that opening up a laptop and wake up speeds are dependent on some other sort of technology; not the SSD? Only the bootup will get a speed boost from this? Also, this is Windows 8.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I haven't used win8 extensively. Sleep is when you tell your computer to go to sleep. Normally your options are shut down, sleep, hibernate, and logoff. Hibernate is a form of sleep, but it's much deeper than a normal sleep.

I'm sure your most recently used programs and data should also get cached or what would be the point of having a caching drive, but you asked about boot speeds. maestro0428 answered the part about programs in a previous post.