happy to find a good solution
just started using version 0.7 of fancy cache. been using superspeed supercache but after several months of usage had multiple file corruption several times and had to reinstall os one time. and this is how i got here
at work i have a indilix gen1 ssd holding the os and apps, one hdd for visual studio's projects (here is my work data). using 500-700megs for level one r/w and 2gb for level 2 on my ssd. it takes a bit to prime the caches but after it all is warmed up then things go smooth. the machine becomes bottlencked by the intel i7 860 (3ghz+) cpu... this is actually good thing.
at home i have only a mechanical drive and use 1000megs for l1 cache r/w. it makes the experience a lot smoother. here i do not have much disk activity but apps that grind the drive (ymess, firefox etc) are a lot snappier.
so it's great when having bursty writes and to a lesser extent on the reads. windows 7 does good read caching anyway. i do not need sustained high read/write performance and this is what facycache does great.
after warming up the apps it all goes smooth. this matters to me most as i reboot seldomly but do actual work for hours. i think the after boot experience is what matters and less booting lightining fast. so it does not make the pc boot faster but it does provide a much smoother experience doing actual work, especially if you use a hdd.
i see this making a big difference on pc/laptop with hdd.
for me as a programmer i see the ideal setup (besides going for a super dooper 1tb, lighting fast ssd) is to have around 1-2gb ram for L1 cache and a small ssd (20-40gb) dedicated for L2 cache. a large hdd would hold the rest of the things. a variant (that i use) is to have a larger ssd (60gb-90gb) as boot drive and have several gigs dedicated to L2 cache.
to me the capabilities of this app are great, just hope the pricing will be sensible.