SSD and Caching

Hi All,

Apologies in advance if I'm being particularly simple.

With SSD drives coming down in price, and becoming a standard feature
in Intel's forthcoming Centrino 2 architecture, will this make caching
redundant in operating systems?

Current operating systems such as Windows XP and much more so with
Windows Vista, try to compensate for the latency of mechanical hard
disks by using RAM caches. Will SSDs make this latency largely
dissappear? I acknowledge SSDs are still significantly slower than
DRAM, but is still worth caching?

Are there knock on effects of zero/low need for caching;
- more memory available to applications
- fewer CPU cycles spent on background tasks to perform caching

Further, where does this leave paging?

Just general questions prompted by all the discussion, but don't seem
to have been covered.

Kindest regards,

Anwar

Are there knock on effects of zero/low need for caching;
- more memory available to applications

Not so, application steal memory pages from cache if they need them.

--
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation

http://www.storagecraft.com