Intel® Smart Response Technology vs OS on SSD

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.

:confused:

(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?

:-??

Partitions are evil. Only time i ever used one was when i installed Linux on the PS3 :p

As i mentioned in a previous post, yes, SSDs do fail, but it still takes 5+ years to wear it out. No different than a regular HDD. Using your SSD as cache could potentially wear it out a bit faster though. Caches always change.

LoL JPM.

IMHO it boils down to longevity vs. performance. For max performance use the SSD for everything except long term storage and backups.

For the best longevity use the SSD for OS & apps and use the HDD for cache, temp & data folders, downloads, long term storage and backups.

And yes I believe the OS should have its own partition just in case Windows falls on its face and you need to reinstall. If you need more details then let me know. Don't want to bore anyone unnecessarily.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by John P. Myers

Partitions are evil. Only time i ever used one was when i installed Linux on the PS3 :p

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Computers are evil, tell me about it...
http://www.deviantart.com/download/1...savemalife.png

Beware, they are coming.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/un...erminators.jpg

I will never more speak with them, David.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/un..._focus_jpg.jpg

Hal Duke

Tom's hardware made a review on SSD caching when the Z68 chipsets came out, including benchmarking etc. Overall they have not been impressed by benefits.

Quote:

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SSD caching is an arguably less tangible benefit. Intel relies heavily on “smart” caching algorithms, which deliberately try to ignore large sequential data streams and the types of access patterns typical of anti-virus scans, for example. Anything that the software guesses will only be touched once doesn't get moved to the SSD. The emphasis is placed on application, boot, and user data, and that information is non-volatile, meaning it carries over between reboots. Unfortunately, between our Z68 preview and this piece, the only clear gain appeared to be game level-loading. Even when we use the caching-optimized Intel SSD 311, we have a hard time making a strong case for caching. I'd still rather make a jump from hard drives to SSDs with a more manually-controlled storage hierarchy. Certain information lives exclusively on a large-enough SSD, and less performance-sensitive data is housed on the hard drive.

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Well, I’ve read articles, reviews, and benchmarks until my eyes feel like they are bleeding. I’ve wavered back and forth between SRT and a native boot OS SSD.

Either is going to better than I’m used to.

With 120GB to work with, I’m on my borderline of enough size to go with the SSD as the main drive. I guess I’ll go with the OS and apps on the SSD, even though I hate the prospect of having a huge D: drive. (Too late to buy a couple of large SSDs for a RAID pair instead.)

While data file location on the D: drive is a no brainer, I’m going to have to be diligent in relocating default directories for data, temporary files, install images, and other non performance related files to the D: drive.

Thanks guys for the feedback. :-bd

Anytime Ron.

And for the record my primary desktop has 5 HDDs. Three have dual partitions and one has three. I did this to spread the I/O load by using the 1st partition on each drive for speed.

Goes something like this
D1-P1: OS 44GB
D2-P1: Temp folder 10GB
D3-P1: Page File 24GB (2x System RAM)
D4-P1: Games & Apps 120GB
D5: ISO files 750GB

The other partitions are used for backups 200GB, AVI files 800GB, Flac files 450GB, Junk files and whatnot ???GB.