Intel Smart Response Technology

Now let's take a closer look at the new features, Intel Smart Response Technology in particular. This is yet another incarnation of Intel's hard drive caching concept that involves use of flash memory buffer. This technology was to be implemented long ago, but Intel could not do it for a number of reasons: no decent standards, high price or something else. The Turbo Memory has been in the market for some time in mobile solutions, and even got to the second generation. But the third one (Braidwood) has never been implemented. Let's see how this technology will do. But first we have to understand whether it's of any use.

You have probably heard of solid-state drives or SSDs. You may have also had time to decide to buy one (just as a 20GB system drive, for example), then to get disappointed and annoyed by exorbitant prices. The problem is that the SSD market remains quite attractive and profitable. So manufacturers are not looking forward to please you with cheap drives. Instead, they offer newer, more capacious SSDs for the same old price that usually exceeds a hundred dollars. At that, the cheapest solid-state drives are based on the slowest chips (defective ones which cannot work faster, or just old leftovers), so you might get really disappointed after buying one.

So is there any hope that the situation will change to better? There is. More and more manufacturers are entering the SSD market, and analysts are forecasting that prices will drop down to $1 per gigabyte. Besides, Z68-based motherboards for the first time support mSATA modules. Essentially, it's the internals of an SSD drive (controller, flash memory chips) put onto a small print-circuit board. Such a module can be easily put onto a motherboard — not by soldering it down but by connecting it through mini-PCIe (to a SATA port).

An mSATA module on a Gigabyte motherboard

Gigabyte has already announced its Z68 series supporting mSATA, and if you plan on visiting Computex 2011, you will probably see those in action. So far only SLC-based modules from Intel are supported, so do not expect low prices. But if the idea catches on, if similar (but cheaper to produce) modules will be shipped massively, the aforementioned cheap SSDs may become real the next year. And so far we can put Intel Smart Response Technology to test with a traditional Kingston SSD which Gigabyte has kindly sent us along with its Z68 motherboards.

But why would one need to use a solid-state drive solely for caching and not just as a system drive? Because a low-capacity SSD can effectively cache access to all sorts of data (but only on the drive being cached). If you use it as a system disk, the SSD will speed up its entire contents, including parts of Windows which are not really used. And it will not cache any applications you have installed on different drives due to the lack of free space, for example. If you just take a higher-capacity SSD that can hold everything except for your media library, there will be, of course, no sense in using it for caching. Just make it a regular system drive.

So, enabling Intel Smart Response is simple. First, you will need to switch the SATA mode to RAID in motherboard's BIOS. (If you installed the OS in the AHCI mode, such a change may require certain tricks during bootup. And remember that Intel Smart Response is only supported in Windows Vista and Windows 7.) Then run the Intel Rapid Storage Control Center and enable acceleration by choosing the SSD (at least 20GB recommended) to speed up the system drive (recommended). Finally, choose the acceleration mode.

Note that all data on the SSD used as cache will be lost. The difference between the Enhanced and Maximized modes is that the former caches disk writes and writes data to the HDD at once, while the latter dumps portions of data to the HDD in certain time intervals defined by the control program. The Enhanced mode is safer, because data won't be lost, but the maximum performance is not achieved. And the Maximized mode is just the opposite. Intel reasonably recommends to use the Enhanced mode by default.

After caching has been set up and PC rebooted, the OS will consider the system HDD and the caching SSD as one RAID array (given you have chosen "Full disk capacity," of course). The same Intel Rapid Storage Control Center will let you switch between caching modes or disable it completely (don't forget to reboot).

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