SSD CACHE / CACHING - Thread

[Neil79]

But there’s one more feature I left out of my Virtu preview: Z68 also supports SSD caching—the ability to add a small solid-state drive to a system already running a larger mechanical disk with the purpose of speeding up read performance of data cached to the SSD. The target market for this feature is probably going to be somewhat limited. However, for the folks who can’t afford 80 GB or larger SSDs and still need extra user storage, caching does work…and pretty painlessly, too.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching-review/2


If anyone is thinking about doing this, DO IT! I seriously recommend it . Basically setting the bios to raid, installing windows 7 as per normal without the ssd installed then installing the Raid/SRT software. Turn system off, install the SSD then reboot to windows and use the srt software to have the ssd as a cache drive. When I first installed the system and used the drive, I really didn't notice any difference and benchmark's seem lackluster even on multiple tries. Turned out I was using an old SATA 1 cable as i thought all sata cables were the same. Plugged in the new sata 3/6GB cable and things were already improving, firefox was loading up instantly for example.

Didn't notice anything with games on first load as the info needs to be cached to the drive, but battlefield 3 for example when I loaded it again it loaded up incredibly quickly. It felt like my 1TB was an SSD drive, on multiple rounds I was the second person to join the server and I wasn't sitting about yawning waiting for it to load. Windows booting was also hugely increased.

Anyone else used their ssd drive as a cache?

 

[Neil79]

Can you run it along with a RAID 10 at the same time, say 4 x 500GB in RAID 10 and use an SSD cache drive?

Im not using SSD for my main drive again, had my second one fail on my yesterday, there rubbish for reliability.

Smart Response Technology works by providing SSD-like performance from a hard disk or RAID array by using an attached SSD of up to 64GB as a cache for read (and write) operations. The technology works similar to Seagate’s hybrid hard disk, but in this case the user can choose their own single hard disk or group of hard disks in a RAID array and a separate SSD to for the cache. The Z68 chipset handles the caching operations and the OS sees a single drive volume as with a dedicated hybrid hard disk.

Only a single SSD can be used for the cache, which can be used to accelerate either a single hard disk or a RAID array that has been configured in RAID level 0, 1, 5 or 10.

Doing some googling it seems you can, though maybe someone from here has first hand experience