ISRT on Z68 motherboards?

[Cigarjohn]

If you have a motherboard that is a Z68 - 1155 and have used the ISRT (Smart Cache) technology, can you please let me know the results you are getting and what drives are you using.


Also, I have a question for the Smart Technology.

Which would be faster?

2 Seagate 600 gb 15k hard drives on a RAID 0 configuration.

or

1 Seagate 600 gb 15k hard drive and 1 120 gb SSD on the ISRT (Smart Cache) technology.



Peace.

 

[mad pistol]

All current generation SSDs will be faster than 15k RPM hard drives. Period.

 

[reflex99]

the access times of the SRT drive will be much faster, which in turn will make the whole thing feel faster.

Sequential will probably be faster on the RAID array, but honestly, most everyone spends way more time with random reads/writes than sequential

Also, SRT only supports up to 60GB drives (or 40, i dont remember). What you might be able to do is create like a 20GB partition for SRT, and then use the rest of the 100GB to boot off of or something

 

[Sn1PeR]

I run a z68, but I opted to just boot off of a single SSD and put my content on my mechanical drives. If you are considering SRT, you should really use a SLC flash based SSD (like Intel's Larson Creek that was designed to be used as SRT cache). There is also a ~60GB limit on cache drive size.

I am unsure if it is possible to boot off of a SSD and use SRT caching for your mechanical drives -- this is something I'm looking into at the moment (haven't heard of it being done yet). If this works, I would recommend booting off of your 120GB SSD (with a few IO intensive apps/games - Arma 2 being an example) and using a small SLC flash SSD for the caching of your mechanical. SRT really speeds up access times the 2nd or 3rd time around -- see this article:

http://pcper.com/reviews/Storage/In...SD-Caching-Z68-Tested/SSD-Caching-performance

The PCPer Podcast also has some good discussion on it. They are overall very positive on the technology.

Setup:
Right now I boot off of a 64GB Kingston V100 SSD (and Starcraft II, Office, Chrome, etc. - very frequently used apps) and have the majority of my games (and users folders via. system links) on a Raid 1 of 2TB WD Blacks. I'm looking to add a larson creek for my Raid 1 and a 120GB current gen sandforce for Arma 2 and video capture.

Incredible resource:
http://pcper.com/ssd-decoder

edit: Dan_D (the HardOCP.com motherboard editor) said this re: SRT tech: "I'd think that a SRT cached RAID0 setup is the best way to go on a consumer desktop or gaming machine unless you want to use an SSD for your operating system. Obviously a dedicated SSD is really the ultimate way to go. RAID 0 improves sequential reads and writes compared to single drives by quite a bit. SRT doesn't. SRT however does improve 4K, 4K QD32, and 8k writes. Random reads are often slower on RAID 0 arrays and I think SRT will help overcome those limitations."