Intel Smart Response Technology

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

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So, whats everyones thoughts on this?

For context, it's the new feature in the Z68 chipset where a small capacity, inexpensive SSD can act as a cache for a conventional hard drive, providing quite significant performance boosts.

I'm very tempted to pair this technology with my RAID0 array - reckon it would be worth it?
 
[TW]Fox;19104754 said:
quite significant performance boosts
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Need more info on that first, we'll find out this week. I wouldn't make any decisions just yet.

I think there'll be a follow up to this with some testing of that feature, so keep your eyes open.

My question is, why not just use the SSD as a boot drive and the HDDs for storage of the larger stuff? We'll have to see how it compares.
 
Because I don't understand the point in using a small SSD as a boot drive. I never boot my machine - its always on. I want everything I do to be quick, not just booting Windows.
 
[TW]Fox;19104863 said:
Because I don't understand the point in using a small SSD as a boot drive. I never boot my machine - its always on. I want everything I do to be quick, not just booting Windows.
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and that's what an ssd is for. If anything, the boot time is probably one of the least important benefits of an SSD. if you want to do everything quickly, then check out the various videos comparing application loading on an SSD and a mechnical drive. they are worlds apart.
 
An SSD will make Windows feel quicker as the seek time on an SSD is less than 1 second. On a HDD fragmentation slows down disk access as the heads need to constantly wait for the disk to spin to read the appropriate areas. You don't have that wait on an SSD.
 
Fox, get yourself a couple of semi decent SSD's in raid 0.

The risk of failure is no where near that of mechanical drives and the speeds are excellent.

I find 2 x 120 OCZ Vertex 2e's to be snappy and their old hat now in comparison to whats out there.
 
james.miller said:
and that's what an ssd is for. If anything, the boot time is probably one of the least important benefits of an SSD. if you want to do everything quickly, then check out the various videos comparing application loading on an SSD and a mechnical drive. they are worlds apart.
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The idea of spending hundreds of pounds on storage doesn't appeal - which is what you need to do in order to run everything from SSD's.
 
It's the right attitude to have, to buy an SSD set a budget and buy the largest available. Then use it for OS, apps and most commonly used files.
 
[TW]Fox;19106250 said:
The idea of spending hundreds of pounds on storage doesn't appeal - which is what you need to do in order to run everything from SSD's.
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there's no need to put everything on ssd's. Media, for example, that is all perfectly fine on a big slow mechanical hard drive - All that need to go on there is the OS.
 
[TW]Fox;19106250 said:
The idea of spending hundreds of pounds on storage doesn't appeal - which is what you need to do in order to run everything from SSD's.
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I think you're missing the point of having an SSD boot drive. You load the whole OS and commonly used applications onto it as normal, and for the large applications (usually games), you simply install them onto another drive by pointing the installer there. There is little to no benefit to have games on an SSD anyway as they mostly load important stuff into the memory when you play, so the only benefit will be loading times. I've never found loading times in modern games to be that bad at all. Some games, mainly open-world ones, might benefit though. Really the GPU limits you there.

What things are you thinking ought to benefit from an SSD then?
 
You don't need everything on an SSD though. As james says above - things like media will show little/no difference to a HDD, so you may as well take storage space over speed, then you can afford to save more media. Like I said above, there's not much benefit at all to most games on SSDs either, so basically you'd be throwing money away for less storage space, which seems foolish.

The distinction I was first trying to make was between SSD caching and a dedicated OS SSD. The likelyhood that a cache for a HDD will store anything other than OS files is slim, as they're where the benefit is greatest for overall performance.
 
This sounds very similar to Readyboost when using an SSD in Windows 7, I expect however it does not rebuild the cache on reboot. Just to recap, Readyboost caches HDD data at sector level, it has nothing todo with program memory, it is simply a disk cache.

I posted about gains of SSD as Readyboost before, but not one single person replied...

I have large media drives I use for processing RAW images, once there loaded the readboost caches them, and it's almost instant when returning to same files.

On Company Of Heros game I play (still a heavy game 4 years on), once you have played first game, I'm normally by far the fastest loading player in multiplayer, again Readyboost on SSD has cached everything. This is despite the game installed on a 500GB Weston Digital RE2 drive, that cost £20 new from OCUK on special before xmas..

It has also made massive differences on compile times in visual studio, and repeat SQL queries over large amounts of data.
 
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alexhull24 said:
My question is, why not just use the SSD as a boot drive and the HDDs for storage of the larger stuff? We'll have to see how it compares.
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Because you can cache the media also..

I shoot Motorsport photography, I can normally return with over 16GB of RAW data. I save my media on Samsung Eco Green 5400rpm drives.

Using Canon software for viewing & working with RAW images. I will skip around the images looking for what's good, then returning to edit.

As mentioned above I have an SSD as dedicated Readyboost drive, as I skip around the images the data is being caches to SSD on a sector level.

I have opened the stats for ReadyBoost, and while viewing images I see the cache size is increasing. I have also watched ReadyBoost read bytes per second value while opening images again, this method does work.
 
Alex,

Goto the properties of the SSD drive and you will find an Readyboost tab. You can set how much space you with to dedicate, try setting a couple of GB at first.

Then go into administration tools --> performance monitor. Then add Readyboost stats.
 
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We won't see how much benefit the new Intel boards with a small SSD will bring yet, but it looks promising in principal and could be a cheap boost.


alexhull24 said:
You don't need everything on an SSD though. As james says above - things like media will show little/no difference to a HDD, so you may as well take storage space over speed, then you can afford to save more media.
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Yep. Just have a 60 or 120GB SSD for Windows, Program Files and Games (or at least the ones which you use or will benefit the most) and put all media onto a cheap mechanical disk or into a NAS.
 
Looking at todays Anandtech review of the Z68 chipset, this seems to be an excellent technology. In some cases it offers performance very close to that of a full SSD setup but with the flexibility and size of a regular HDD setup.
 
The thing with installing OS on SSD is only a small percentage of files are regularly accessed, and some never accessed.

Given this having a small SSD caching regular data from all HDD's will give near similar performance, but fraction of cost, plus all local HDD's become hybrid.

There is already a chain of caching from your page file to the registers in your CPU, this just adds another level of caching.

No one has their main memory running as registry speed, or even CPU memory cache speed it would be to expensive and give no real gain. Likewise no one makes 2TB SSD drives, but you can use a small SSD to cache the common accessed files on it.
 
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