Thanks for your response. I am beyond that point having totally dumped the 16GB SSD cache and just replacing it with a 500GB SSD "C" drive altogether...I think the costs of SSD's has come down to the point that it is more feasible to do that and there is less need for a caching SSD.
However, I think you're on the right track...I think there could very well have been something in Windows 8.1 that screwed up the caching. I've seen a lot of other problems with Windows 8.1 so I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case...I've got an ASUS laptop that won't upgrad to WIndows 8.1 because of driver incompatibilty issues.