I just ordered a 850 Pro,is this software really that essential to have?Would the ssd run any worst or better?Till i transfer it to my wifes rig some time later or i get a Sata 3 pci e card i will be stuck at Sata 2 speeds.
That's a worthwhile question, and I have an answer -- if only an opinion.
I have an 840-Pro boot-system disk for my main-use system, and installed Magician so I could take advantage of RAPID.
But we buy various makes and SSD models. Magician won't cache those drives, even as it will perform a benchmark on them.
Crucial also has its utility, but I forgot it's name. And I just bought an ADATA 480GB SSD which comes with a program called SSD-Tool with an interface of so much eye-candy that you'd want to wear Ray-Bans. I had remarked that the "OS optimization" feature of SSD-Tool is so aggressive that you'd rather make the tweaks to virtual-memory, Prefetch, SuperFetch and indexing by doing it manually -- not a big problem.
If you had three SSDs in the same system of different manufacture, you could install all the bundled software for each, so that you have something that reports the number of TB writes for each one. But you can't cache all the SSDs unless the bundled software offers caching, and you'd have three different operable caches -- a proposition that seems sloppy or potentially troublesome.
So I don't use RAPID. I wouldn't even use the Marvell feature that works with certain controller chip models. Even Intel IRST SSD-caching of hard-disks is proprietary, but it doesn't have to be.
I'm really happy with the lifetime license for
Primocache. Much more versatile than RAPID, allows for L1 caches for SSD partitions and volumes, and L1+L2 caches for HDDs if you want to dedicate all or part of an SSD to cache an HDD and then cache the whole enchilada to RAM.
The latest version now allows for the L1 cache to be written to an SSD boot-drive, so that it's restored at boot-time. Figure if you shrunk or eliminated your swap/paging file, and your L1 cache is defined to be about 3GB, that's a feasible trade-off. Unlike Windows Virtual Memory, Primo is not going to write anything of the L1 to disk for "persistence" until you restart or shut down your system.
One more in my long diatribe here. You mentioned that you are using the 850 on an SATA-II controller plug? The caching would help with that considerably. I have a Crucial MX100 500GB in a 9-year-old C2D executive notebook with an SATA-II controller. The lappie is fitted with 8GB of RAM, and I can use 3GB -- even more -- to cache the SSD.
There have been many criticisms of the caching solution, but caching has been around as a technique throughout the evolution of the technology. I cannot quantify how much it helps, but with all my experience with it -- it doesn't hurt anything.