Why a drive? The real answer is “don’t ask, that’s just what we geeks call mass storage devices. You can call it anything you like if you don’t mind taking more time and/or people not understanding you…”
My machine’s got a small (16G) flash drive in it running as a cache. Definitely improves boot speed. I’ve thought about swapping that out for a larger flash drive, but there’s an issue here – while flash drives are fast and shock resistant, they can WEAR OUT with repeated writes. Yes, you get a fair number of cycles. Yes, the drivers used these days try to distribute wear across the flash memory. But I’m still not convinced I want to use flash for anything but “read-mostly” data, and Windows isn’t really set up to let you carve that off easily into a separate drive or partition. (And I’m not quite ready to go 100% Linux; I have a software investment I’m not willing to give up until there’s something at least as good for the Linux world.)
