I’m building a new PC. (First new one in 6 years)

The motherboard will have the Intel Z77 chipset along with an i7-3770K 3.50 GHz CPU.

I also have a 120GB SSD and a 2TB HD.

My question is, should I put the OS and applications on the SSD and deal with a ~120 GB C: drive and large D: drive?

Or should I use the available Intel® Smart Response Technology to automatically RAID cache the most accessed files from the HD on the SSD? This would make the large HD the C: drive utilizing the speed of the SSD transparently.



(Intel® Smart Response Technology can only use a maximum of 64 GB for the cache. Therefore, the remainder of the SSD, about 56GB, would be left to partition as another logical drive. (D: in this case.) I could use this smaller SSD partition for a permanent home for the pagefile and other non-cache uses.)



I’m leaning towards playing with the Intel® Smart Response Technology option so I don’t have to contend with pointing data directories, etc. at the D: drive. It would also place the OS on the HD while executing a copy of the most used files from the SSD cache for a performance gain. I’m thinking this compromise in a little overall drive performance, would be worth protecting against the prospect of the SSD failing, getting eventually full, and dealing with the two separate SSD and HD partitions)

Any thoughts, advice, or experience on which road to take?