Intel Smart Response (SSD caching) annoying requirements

[PingSpike]

Just a mini-rant here.

So I'm doing another sidegrade (that is apparently what I do these days) and I have a SSD accelerated 1TB drive that mostly has steam games and VMs on it. I'm running an asrock z77 motherboard. I removed my i5-3570 because I intend to use it for testing something else and installed a celeron G530 just so I could use the PC in the mean time.

Now I can't even access the 1TB drive. If you go into the Intel whatever they call hard drive settings thing the accelerate tab is gone and the SSD and drive are listed as "incompatible". Apparently, not only do you require a specific chipset, but smart response only works if you also have a Core cpu. Because the chipset thing wasn't arbitrary enough for running a piece of software, Intel needed to double upsell.

That's annoying, but I just want the disk to turn back into regular drive...who cares about the SSD caching in this temporary configuration? The only options I have in the CTRL+I utility at boot and the Intel application basically say they will destroy all data. Thanks Intel for just making things hard for no reason. You blocked me even turning it off in your zeal for more cash.

If I boot up into linux, the data is all there so I'm fine (and it wasn't really valuable data either) but this is fairly ridiculous.

Anyway, I think I'm done with the caching thing going forward. Its a good idea but all the arbitrary requirements suck all point out of it and it adds complexity. Only 64GB? Really? Chipset and CPU requirements? I guess should be happy you don't have to install a Intel branded SSD just to get it to work, that certainly seems like something they would do. And SSDs are so cheap now it doesn't really seem worth the effort. I'll just buy a bigger one and reduce my CPU budget to compensate.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I feel your pain, as the Prez would say in the '90s.

I started using the SSD-caching/HDD-acceleration feature when I built my SB-K system in 2011. Large SSDs were just too expensive and not large enough. It seemed to work "OK," but I didn't like the proprietary nature of ISRT.

Fast-forward just a bit to the introduction of Samsung's 840 drive-series, bundled with Magician, which featured RAPID -- RAM-caching of the SSD.

It, too, was proprietary.

What you describe never happened to me. "Losing access to the underlying erstwhile-accelerated HDD?" I couldn't imagine it.

But all it would take to trip the BIOS' tallying and reassessment of the cache -- some system instability. I had a peculiar case whereby my system would either freeze or blue-screen between once a week and once a month. Difficult to replicate; just as difficult for that reason to track down. Among my suspicions: ISRT. Turns out it was a secondary BIOS power-saving feature that caused idle instability when the processor was showing an EIST voltage of 1.008V.

If you think that caching is a real improvement for integration of a large HDD in your system, or if you're tired of finding that adding a second SSD like a Crucial MX200 to your Sammy 840/850 doesn't allow you to cache it to RAM, the best solution I know of is the one I'm currently using.

It turns out that Intel's ISRT is not a matter of "proprietary hardware," nor is Samsung's RAPID. Those solutions are, instead, implemented through "proprietary software" bundled with their products and limited to the use of their hardware. But there is nothing that says someone else can't implement essentially the same respective features of both ISRT and RAPID, without limiting them arbitrarily to use of particular hardware. In fact, you might want a solution that integrates the features of both ISRT and RAPID, and doesn't limit your choice of an SSD-cache drive-size.

So around mid-2014, because I had an old laptop with an SATA-II controller for which I'd installed a Crucial MX100 SSD, I began experimenting with two products: Romex PrimoCache, and Superspeed's SuperCache.

The latter product only implements direct RAM-caching; there is no SSD-caching like ISRT which can be added to an overall caching task.

Romex -- a company located in Shanghai -- had been offering a 90-day free trial period, which has been shortened to 60 days, probably because of increased demand for the product. But it's a lifetime license, costing about $30 for a single PC and around $75 for three PCs. Further, you can remove an installation from one computer and re-install it on another under the same license.

So you can create a 120GB SSD-cache for a 6TB HDD, or for six 6TB HDDs at one time. And you can then add RAM-caching to that overall "L2" SSD-cache. Or, as in my own implementations, you can create two caching tasks: one to cache an SSD boot-system disk to RAM, and the other to cache HDDs to an SSD and then cache the result to RAM. If you saved 14GB of a potential swapfile size by tweaking your SSD, you can use some of that saving to make the RAM-caches persistent between boots or restarts.

I've had very good luck with Primo on both my laptop and three desktops. Never lost any data. If something forced a CHKDSK or made a cache corrupt, it was my own fault. For instance, you can't have a dual-boot Win7/Win10 system whereby you write some data to the Win10 boot volume from a Win7 boot session, so you don't want to assign drive letters in one OS for disk volumes/partitions used by the other OS. You can still implement Primo under both. If you choose to share a disk-volume between the two OS's, you could only use RAM-caching in either OS without making it persistent -- it has to die when you restart the computer.

Naysayers will argue that the improvement "only shows up in benchmarks," but my benchmarks show me that 4K writes to my HDD (on an SATA-II port) with deferred writes (at your own risk) implemented produce the result of ~300MB/s, and I can improve that result be increasing the size of the RAM-cache on top of the "L2" SSD-cache. The other statistics are much more astounding than that. I chose to add more memory to my system and abjure a RAM command-rate setting of 1 just so I could use larger cache sizes.

So I install all my games in a "Program files" directory of my hard disk. And if you have a stable system -- I mean "rock-stable" -- hit-rates for persistent caches will grow with every boot-session.

Otherwise, you may choose to jettison the caching solutions entirely. But if large HDDs were becoming obsolete, the drive makers wouldn't be producing bigger ones, would they?

I even had a mishap similar to a "power-outage" or "system instability" because I leaned on my computer case while I was cleaning filters and accidentally pressed the power button -- forcing an Event-ID 41 "critical error." All the caching was recovered after running CHKDSK on the relevant drives, and I simple dropped the existing cache-tasks and restored them again.

Just as an afterthought. You can cache RAID arrays of any kind, but if you get "real" performance increases as shown by the synthetic benchmarks with AHCI-mode, it would hardly matter.

Also, there are various opinions about which driver to use with an Intel controller. The native MS Windows driver MSAHCI may only show minor shortcomings compared to the Intel driver, if any. I prefer the native driver, and I don't even install the Intel software anymore. If I leave Magician installed for a Sammy drive, it is only to keep tabs on the cumulative writes to the SSD.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just a mini-rant here.

So I'm doing another sidegrade (that is apparently what I do these days) and I have a SSD accelerated 1TB drive that mostly has steam games and VMs on it. I'm running an asrock z77 motherboard. I removed my i5-3570 because I intend to use it for testing something else and installed a celeron G530 just so I could use the PC in the mean time.

Now I can't even access the 1TB drive. If you go into the Intel whatever they call hard drive settings thing the accelerate tab is gone and the SSD and drive are listed as "incompatible". Apparently, not only do you require a specific chipset, but smart response only works if you also have a Core cpu. Because the chipset thing wasn't arbitrary enough for running a piece of software, Intel needed to double upsell.

That's annoying, but I just want the disk to turn back into regular drive...who cares about the SSD caching in this temporary configuration? The only options I have in the CTRL+I utility at boot and the Intel application basically say they will destroy all data. Thanks Intel for just making things hard for no reason. You blocked me even turning it off in your zeal for more cash.

If I boot up into linux, the data is all there so I'm fine (and it wasn't really valuable data either) but this is fairly ridiculous.

Anyway, I think I'm done with the caching thing going forward. Its a good idea but all the arbitrary requirements suck all point out of it and it adds complexity. Only 64GB? Really? Chipset and CPU requirements? I guess should be happy you don't have to install a Intel branded SSD just to get it to work, that certainly seems like something they would do. And SSDs are so cheap now it doesn't really seem worth the effort. I'll just buy a bigger one and reduce my CPU budget to compensate.

Yeah, Intel's feature lock-in is BRUTAL. No Core i3 or faster? No SRT for you!

They used to disable all SpeedStep / power-management features on Celerons too, just to be jerks. Considering how many of those that they sell, that's quite a lot of "fleet MPG in-efficiency", when you consider Energy Star and the like.

 

[JimmiG]

I used to run a 64 GB OCZ Synapse cache SSD which came with the Dataplex software. It worked surprisingly well and made my old 640 GB WD feel almost like an SSD.

In theory, SSD caching is a great idea, especially if you only have a small SSD (120 GB). These days with 1 TB SSD's becoming affordable, it doesn't matter as much. You can install pretty much all your games and software on the SSD anyway.

 

[PingSpike]

I managed to get this going by changing the registry settings for drivers and then switching to ACHI mode to pull the "raid" invalidation out from under it.

The other bummer the caching feature is how it increases boot times due to running in RAID mode, which I'd forgotten about until I turned off raid.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I managed to get this going by changing the registry settings for drivers and then switching to ACHI mode to pull the "raid" invalidation out from under it.

The other bummer the caching feature is how it increases boot times due to running in RAID mode, which I'd forgotten about until I turned off raid.

Oh. That's the other thing I didn't like about Intel's ISRT. It creates a peculiar RAID configuration for the caching drive, and you have to choose RAID mode in BIOS to make it work.

My last post was so long I feel embarrassed about it. Now I remember vividly my long journey away from ISRT -- operative on my "main machine" until January 2014, when I installed a Sammy 840 Pro. And of course -- changing from RAID to AHCI mode without panic descending about boot failure and anticipating the registry changes.

After that, all my machines including the server now run in AHCI mode. OF course, Samsung required it for RAPID. But caching with PrimoCache insures that you can use any combination of drives and RAM, and any combination of storage modes.

I knew beforehand that I'd sacrifice quick boot times to making my caching persistent, but I'm really pleased with the configuration. And since I just freed up a 120GB Intel SSD, I am thinking to replace the 60GB Mushkin Chronos with the Intel.

There shouldn't be much of a problem now with the expense of 1TB SSDs, and I think I can get an ADATA or Reactor for around $200. But all of the 500GB boot disks on my systems are less than 60% full -- maybe even less than that. I have so many SATA-II and -III HDDs -- 1TB or 500GB -- I can afford to save my money for a while. But the caching program really lets me tune this sucker.

So it's an issue about whether the "synthetic benchmarks" and real-world performance are in any way similar, or if the gains are "marginal," or whatever speculation someone might put forth. I think I get better performance, given my types of computer usage. And how the machine is used would determine the degree of improvement with caching strategies.

If the program (PrimoCache) were less reliable, I'd have second thoughts. But on four systems, it hasn't caused the slightest problem for almost two years from the time I started using it.

 

[PingSpike]

That's good to know on Primocache. I might have to look into it.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

That's good to know on Primocache. I might have to look into it.

I'm often very enthusiastic about software I've investigated and discovered through a deliberate process.

I'll make the point again. If it seems totally reliable, stable, easily recoverable if ever need be, then the only question is one of how much it improves things. Just a minute, so I can upload some screen-snaps:

That's my hard disk volume -- half of a 1TB drive with volumes defined for Win 7 and Win 10 use in a dual-boot system. For the time being, all the SSD caching is done for the Win 7 volume, and a large RAM-cache without "L2" SSD caching supports the Win 10 part of the HDD. You can split an SSD for caching two different OS installations and two different HDD volumes, but you can't have both accessing the same cache. Performance is better with the Win 7 boot session because all 60GB of the caching SSD are allocated to the HDD volume.

The next shot shows the benchie for my boot-system SSD, cached to RAM. For the Win 7 OS, 3,072MB of RAM caches the SSD boot disk, and 2048MB of RAM caches the SSD-cached HDD in the prior screenshot:

Trying to figure out just what sort of performance improvement arises from this, one would need to look at the hit-rates arising from making both RAM-caches persistent by saving them at restart/shutdown for loading upon the next bootup. This morning, my hit-rate on drive C: quickly rose from 6% to 33% as I "just did more things" with the computer. It was at 77% for the HDD, which is cached first to SSD and then to ("L1") RAM. One iteration of a Steam game pushed the hit-rate to around 98%.

As much as I see others posting threads about new developments in storage like "phase-change memory," a jack-knife-of-tools program like Primo-Cache really does what it does well.

And it's block-level caching, just like ISRT or the Marvell-controller "Hyper-Duo" equivalent.

I guess I had become so happy with the dependability of the program and its versatility, that I spent about $25 on a 2x2GB RAM kit to bolster my 2x8GB kit, and sacrificed the ability to run the latter kit at CR=1.

Of course, you could play it safe, and not create your cache tasks with deferred writes enabled. That would show up severely in the 4K writes benchmark, which would drop to between 50 and 60 MB/s for either the boot-SSD or the double-cached HDD. But I have UPS batteries for each of my PCs, my memory has been thoroughly tested, and my systems are wonderfully stable.