Motherboard with Intel Smart Response Technology

[davidst99]

Hi,

I have a Gigabyte motherboard with Intel Smart Response Technology and an on board msata port for a small SSD drive. I currently have a 256GB SSD drive for my OS and programs and 2x 2 TB traditional hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration. Does it make sense to get a msata SSD drive to take advantage for the Intel Smart Response Technology or would it be redundant if I already have a SSD drive? I'm not sure if the msata drive acts as a cache drive or like a regular drive. Thanks.

David

 

[blastingcap]

It's redundant to use a SSD to cache an SSD and in fact Intel recommends against it. Use your current SSD as the OS drive and don't mess with SRT or mSATA SSDs. SRT is for those who want to mimic Seagate's "Momentus" hard drives... basically a small SSD cache and large hard drive that appears to the OS as one big drive. It's silly imho as the SSD will take a lot more read/write punishment that way and wear out faster. Better to just use a larger SSD as your OS drive and add a big hard drive to store larger files that would not really benefit from fast access speeds, such as music, photos, and video files.

 

[NickelPlate]

We be interesting to hear from someone on this who has personal experience with this. I'm in a similiar boat but I don't have an SSD at all. But you already do and assuming your SSD is your OS/Application drive and you're using the HDD for storage then I wouldn't think you'd see much benefit.

It seems to me SRT was designed for people who want or need to continue using conventional disk drives but want a speed boost without investing in a large SSD. I have an msata connector too on my board but the problem with the msata drives is that for not much more money, you can get a higher capacity 2.5" SSD and still use it for SRT.

 

[davidst99]

Thanks for the information. I guess I'll pass on getting the SSD cache drive.

David

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Thanks for the information. I guess I'll pass on getting the SSD cache drive.

David

I'll still throw in my 2-cents per NickelPlate's first sentence and remark.

Biggest bottleneck you will have on a PC is the mass storage at the bottom of the hardware pyramid. Typically, from the "theoretical" perspective, this means lowest cost per MB or GB for storage; longer access time; device has highest storage volume. Top end of pyramid includes your CPU registers, L1, L2 and L3 cache. In between that -- you have RAM (as a storage device).

To reduce the disk bottleneck in past years, I build RAID0 and RAID5 volumes. With RAID5, you might have four drives (as I did ) running 24/7, consuming power. And even so, with the parity disk activity, your speed for sequential reads and writes (while greater than single disk) is not all that great. For sequential reads, I think I was approaching between 250 to 300 MB/s.

I decided to try this ISRT feature. Got a 60GB SATA-III SSD (Pyro), and discovered that you get approximately the same overall performance with an SATA-II HDD on SATA-II port as you would by putting a -III HDD on a -III port.

If the cache goes "south," your accelerated HDD survives. Further, you reduce wear and tear on the HDD through caching, which means less worry about data-loss when the HDD begins to fail. That is, you reduce the chances of failure by reducing stress on the HDD.

Right now, a 500GB SSD @ $1.00/GB costs just under $500. I think I invested $150 in my Pyro and Samsung F3 1TB HDD. So if I can get the type of performance I find with ISRT SSD-caching, it isn't cost-effective to buy one or more half-TB SSD's for the performance. Of course, my power-consumption may be a little higher because i'm running an HDD. But it's lower for the caching.

Also, we see "hybrid" drives available, like Seagate Momentus. The performance of these (last time I checked) can't even come close to a 60GB SSD caching or accelerating a 1TB SATA-II HDD.

And forget about the VelociRaptor SATA-III's. Your performance with the caching will only be slightly better, or conversely, your performance with an SATA-II HDD will be almost as good.