Intel's new SRT (Smart Response Technology) on Z series MBs

[Neodymium]

If you were following along on my G5PC worklog, I landed a Z68 motherboard...my old SSD was going to become my primary drive and the 1TB my backup and media...

Then, while reading my instruction manual for the MB, I got into the whole SSD + HDD concept and how you can drive about 40% more performance out of the standard HDD...it's amazing what the technology can do even with its downsides. Caching up to 64GB of SSD space to use as a read/write?

Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to this tech...if you had a large SSD (say 120GB or above), then you don't need this, but what if you scored something smaller (maybe even bought Intel's 20GB SLC SSD) and you wanted to bump up the speeds, this is the ticket. At the same time, performing consistently is a hit and a miss and also it is not available on the P series motherboards, which sucks.

Anyone else care to share their thoughts?

PS: Intel didn't put me up to this I'm just thinking out loud...LOL

[TheGreatSatan]

I think the technology is kind of stupid. Like you said, you would really need a tiny SSD to take advantage of it. Most people who spend any money on an SSD will at least get a 64GB one and then you'll not use the tech

It's basically like OCZ's Revo hybrid drive. It's a 1TB drive with 100GB for caching. Is it faster than normal mechanical HD? Yes. Is a regular SSD faster? Easy

[Wordbiker]

The part I didn't like was it ties the two together in a RAID. On my mobo this isn't possible on the SATA 6GB headers. Performance is better by just using the old OS + Archive setup and with less hassle.

[Konrad]

I can see this cache tech eventually being useful on low-end everything-integrated value systems and on mobile platforms. Otherwise, I suspect it'll be obsoleted fairly quickly by ever-increasing performance specs on the drives themselves. Then again, it is only first generation stuff ... it might lead to new performance paradigms.