SSD caching

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I'm planning a new i500k system for me old case; after reading about SSDs I'm worried about their reliability - many seem to fail within a year.
On the new Asus boards with z68 chipset there is the ssd caching feature. I don't understand how this works; If the ssd fails, would I lose any data/have to reinstall OS - or does this work with the OS purely on the hdd?
Thanks..
 
any ideas guys? Just want to know if this is a more reliable option than using SSD as a system drive..
Also, would this cause a problem for a dual boot Ubuntu/Windows 7 install?
 
I would expect you to lose everything if the caching ssd fails. There will be info on the ssd that will be lost..
 
Well this freaked me out a bit.

But just wanted to know what happens in SRT SSD caching if the SSD fails?

You have a Warranty: 3 Years, so send it back and get a replacement :D


Enhanced mode is the most secure, but it limits the overall performance improvement you'll see as write performance will still be bound by the performance of your hard drive (or array). In enhanced mode, if you disconnect your SSD cache or the SSD dies, your system will continue to function normally. Note that you may still see an improvement in write performance vs. a non-cached hard drive because the SSD offloading read requests can free up your hard drive to better fulfill write requests.

Maximized mode offers the greatest performance benefit, however it also comes at the greatest risk. There's obviously the chance that you lose power before the SSD cache is able to commit writes to your hard drive. The bigger issue is that if something happens to your SSD cache, there's a chance you could lose data. To make matters worse, if your SSD cache dies and it was caching a bootable volume, your system will no longer boot. I suspect this situation is a bit overly cautious on Intel's part, but that's the functionality of the current version of Intel's 10.5 drivers.

Moving a drive with a maximized SSD cache enabled requires that you either move the SSD cache with it, or disable the SSD cache first. Again, Intel seems to be more cautious than necessary here.

The upside is of course performance as I mentioned before. Cacheable writes just have to hit the SSD before being considered serviced. Intel then conservatively writes that data back to the hard drive later on.
 
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I would expect you to lose everything if the caching ssd fails. There will be info on the ssd that will be lost..

Depending on your WriteBack / WriteThru setting - either nothing, your Hard drive just wont be cached anymore, or you potentially lost the one thing you were writing at the time. Any data on the HDD will be as it was with or without caching - just slower.
 
So, it looks like a good compromise between speed and reliability; I can use my old hdd, get ssd speeds from a cheaper 30/60GB ssd, and not have to worry about sudden ssd death.


Could this be done with 2 hdds in raid? I'm afraid I'm a total noob as regards raid, all I know is that for SRT you need to enable raid mode.
Will this be possible with a partition/dual boot OS in the hdd?
 
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SRT will happily accelerate a RAIDed set of HDD's. I used it on a RAID5 array for a while

As SRT works at the hardware/motherboard level, it wont care if you are running one OS or three.
 
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