Best 'value' SSD?

Soldato
Joined
5 Jan 2009
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Have you considered drive caching it works very well.... ? You could cache a 60GB ssd to your 1TB drive as you have a Z68 motherboard.

I'm not too familiar with this. What are the benefits?

Is it something for the OS drive, or will it speed up reading and writing of documents etc?
 
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Associate
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15 Sep 2005
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I agree, it's not true that 128gb or more is the minimum.

I`ve built a few "office" PCs with Crucial M4 64gb SSDs. Absolutely no problem fitting Win 7, Updates, Antivirus, Office suite etc onto the drive. There's around 35Gb left after all the "main" stuff is installed. 1Tb HHDs make people lazy. It's like having a large shed, there is always the temptation to fill it with rubbish. 35Gb is still a lot of space, unless you are storing lots of photos or apps.

Yes, I tend to keep a seperate partition of windows and as far as I'm concerned could manage fine with something like a 30GB partition for win7 ... however my two sons seem to insist on choosing a new name everytime they save games (FIFA manager being the prime culprit) and have the ability to fill that partition however much I expand it (other day I increased it size by 15GB as I needed that space to do a run with PCMark .... couple of weeks later there's only 5GB space left!) ... anyway, must sort out moving there user dirs (where all this stuff gets saved) onto another partition where there's more space!
 
Soldato
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I'm not too familiar with this. What are the benefits?

About %90 the speed of the SSD but with the space of a large drive like your 1TB....

I use a 60GB Agility 3 as a boot drive and then have another one caching a 2TB games drive and it works remarkably well.

Its called Intel Smart Response Technology and here is a link to a review.

IRST review

Intel aimed it to be used to cache a boot drive but it can be configured to cache a different drive as well. It can take some setting up but is well worth the effort as you will essentially end up with a 1TB drive running at about %90 the performance of a standalone SSD.
 
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Soldato
Joined
5 Jan 2009
Posts
4,759
About %90 the speed of the SSD but with the space of a large drive like your 1TB....

I use a 60GB Agility 3 as a boot drive and then have another one caching a 2TB games drive and it works remarkably well.

Its called Intel Smart Response Technology and here is a link that explains it from intel. A google search of Intel IRST should bring up some reviews.

Intel IRST

Intel aimed it to be used to cache a boot drive but it can be configured to cache a different drive as well. It can take some setting up but is well worth the effort as you will essentially end up with a 1TB drive running at about %90 the performance of a standalone SSD.

Yeah just been reading up on it. Not sure I see the benefit of SSD caching for movies/music drive however.
 
Soldato
Joined
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Telford
Yeah just been reading up on it. Not sure I see the benefit of SSD caching for movies/music drive however.

No real benefit for a media drive. I see quite a difference in using it on my games drive. It gives a decent increase in performance comparable to an SSD but without the size issues and expense of a large SSD. For me with around a 1.5TB game drive it works wonders...
 
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