
- Intel Smart Response Technology Setup Mac OS X#
- Intel Smart Response Technology Setup Download And Install#
- Intel Smart Response Technology Setup Software For The#
Motherboard manufacturers were quick to take advantage of SRT, and a number of Z68 motherboards appeared sporting the connectors for an mSata drive. And 10, a block level SSD caching accelerator (Smart Response Technology) with support for.At the same time, Intel launched the 311, a 20GB capacity, 3Gb/s Sata SSD designed specifically to be used as a cache drive in Z68-based systems. With the launch of the EZ Smart The Intel Rapid Storage Technology (Intel RST) Driver 16. The cache drive approach brings almost all of the benefits of SSD - fast boot times and file access - without having to break the bank to get a large storage space.GIGABYTE is once again leading the industry for their support of Intel ® Smart Response Technology with the recent announcement of the worlds first range of Z68 mSATA enabled motherboards as well as the soon-to-be available GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3-iSSD motherboard that comes pre-bundled with the 20GB Intel ® SSD 311 Series. This will give you the benefit off SSD speeds on a more cost effective, higher capacity, slower speed mechanical drive.So, the question is, if I have an SSD disk as a primary disk, does it make sense to use Intels SRT The root of this question is that Im trying to setup my.Intel’s thinking was to get ordinary users into the SSD game by allowing then to put small, cheap solid-state drives into their systems alongside existing, large capacity HDDs rather than suggest they swap out the latter for a more expensive yet not as capacious SSD. Intel Smart Response Technology (also known as SSD caching) is a utility that allows you to accelerate, your operating system and programs that are installed on a Mechanical Drive, with a much faster SSD.
Caching allows you to get the best of the both worlds.At least, that’s how it’s being sold. You can now pick up a fairly fast performing 120/128GB SSD for well under a hundred pounds to hold the OS and all the apps you need, but if you have a lot of data on your system, trading capacity for performance isn’t always attractive. That said, SSDs approaching the kind of capacities we’ve come to take for granted with HDDs are still incredibly pricey. That has brought down the prices of mid-size SSDs to the point when many users are willing to take a punt.
Intel Smart Response Technology Setup Software For The
The technology uses no more than 64GB of space on the SSD. The low-value data is ignored and left out of the caching process.To enable SRT, you have to enter the motherboard’s Bios settings and switch the Sata controllers to Raid mode - SRT won’t work in either ACHI or IDE modes. It is able to discriminate between high value or multi-use bytes, such as boot, application and user data, and low-value data used in background tasking. SRT works by caching the I/O data blocks of the most frequently used applications. SRT has since been supported on the more recent Z77, H77 and Q77 chipsets. Intel Smart Response TechnologyIntel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT) first appeared a couple of years ago in version 10.5 of the company’s Rapid Storage Technology (RST) Raid software for the Sandy Bridge chipset, but it was initially only enabled on the Z68 desktop chipset and a couple of mobile products.

Intel Smart Response Technology Setup Mac OS X
The technology doesn’t behave in the same way as the usual SSD cache. Fusion Drive uses Mac OS X’s Core Storage Logical Volume Manager, available in version 10.7 Lion and up, to present multiple drives as a one single volume. The 1TB option is available for the latest Mac Mini or any new iMac, but the 3TB option is exclusively tied to the 27in iMac.
The software works with AMD as well as Intel chipsets - so it’s the obvious choice for folk with a dislike of Chipzilla products - but doesn’t support chipsets produced by Nvidia. These three and others use Nvelo’s Dataplex caching software. Dedicated cache drivesProbably the most useful alternatives to SRT are the solid-state cache drives offered by the likes of Corsair, Crucial and OCZ with their Accelerator, Adrenaline and Synapse products. El Reg will be digging deeper into Fusion in a future article. The idea is to ensure that the most-read files are stored on the SSD, which is considered part of the host system’s overall storage capacity rather than a separate, ‘hidden’ buffer.
Intel Smart Response Technology Setup Download And Install
To make sure that the OS knows what drives or what kinds are in the system you need to run the Windows Experience Index at least once.Real-time Trim hints are sent to the drive when the file system moves or deletes files, but the drive may not be able to react to the hints if it’s writing or erasing. However, if it sees an SSD, it will send a complete set of Trim hints for the entire volume. If it sees a standard hard disk in the system, it will regularly defrag it in the normal way to ensure file data is kept in contiguous sectors. The new Storage Optimizer utility handles different kinds of storage in different ways. To make sure that the Dataplex install has worked and the drive is in cache mode, there is a utility included to allow you to check all is well.Dataplex comes with a quick-look status utility Caching in WindowsIn Windows 7, Microsoft turned off file defragmentation for SSDs, but with Windows 8 it’s back, albeit in a different guise. Just fit the cache drive, download and install the software, tell it which is the drive being cached, and off you go.
For the mechanical drive, I used one of Western Digital’s latest 4TB Black drives, a fast performer with a 7200rpm spin speed and 64MB of cache. I used both this 2.5in drive and the 30GB, 2.5in Corsair as alternatives to Intel’s technology. I’ve a Crucial Adrenaline (£60) which comes in just one flavour, 50GB, too. I also had to hand a 30GB Corsair Accelerator (£47) SSD cache drive, which also comes in 45GB (£55) and 60GB (£80) capacities. TestingTo explore the potential desktop performance benefits of Intel’s SRT technology and of SSD cache drives over a standard large capacity hard drive, I used an Asus P8Z77-V Premium motherboard which, as well as supporting SRT, comes with a 32GB LiteOn mSATA SSD already installed.
The Maximum mode delivers write speeds way in excess of Enhanced mode, which is held back by the need to write data to the hard drive simultaneously, though the quid pro quo is a more flexible set-up.CrystalDiskMark results in megabytes per second (MB/s)There are two sets of figures for the Corsair and SanDisk drives as they use a SandForce controller which hates incompressible data and likes compressible 1s and 0s.So is SSD caching a viable option? If you’re on a very limited budget or you just want to kick start your existing desktop system without the hassle of re-installing the OS or messing about with the Bios, then using a cache drive is undoubtedly the best way to go to get an instant performance boost without spending too much money or putting you to too much effort.However, if you are building a system from scratch then the 120/128GB SSD for the OS and applications, and a separate high-capacity HDD for data makes more sense. But it's a different story with disk writes. Both modes show comparable read speeds - as they do in the various PCMark 07 tests, shown above. The Marvell chip also gives the Adrenaline the edge over the SanDisk Extreme SSD, which has another LSI SandForce controller, this time using the more advanced SF-2281.The difference between the two modes offered by Intel's Smart Response Technology is clearly show in CrystalDiskMark testing. This gives the Crucial product a distinct advantage over Corsair’s Accelerator drive, which is based on a 3Gb/s Sata LSI SandForce SF-2181 controller. The drive is based on the company’s m4 SSD, which uses the Marvell 88SS9174-BLD2 6Gb/s Sata controller chip.
If you’re using a motherboard with a compatibly Intel chipset, SRT likewise is a good, easy option that’s slightly slower than rival caches in some applications, slightly faster in others.
