Intel Smart Response Technology

[Kayko]

Hello everyone, kind of hoping that someone is familiar with the new Intel SRT system.

A short background: I currently have a WD Black Raid 0 setup. I've tested a mid level SSD. The SSD was clearly faster in load times and what-not but in testing, Read/Write speeds were about the same so left me to conclude that seek times are ultimately the key factor in why the SSD performed so much better then the Raid 0 setup. Either way, I decided that for price vs. performance, the SSD was simply not worth it.

Now comes this new SRT tech and I so happen to be looking to build a 2nd machine. (SRT in < 10 words: makes the SSD a caching platform for the HDD)

I can not find any information comparing the SRT to a typical RAID 0 setup though. Plenty of stuff can be found for SRT vs single HDD, and ya, the new tech is obviously faster, but that doesn't help even a little bit.

So, getting down to it, is this new tech legit? I don't expect pure SSD performance, but should I expect load improvements over RAID 0?

[Fuzzykins]

You cannot SRT a raid setup.

[Kayko]

You cannot SRT a raid setup.

Hmm, I didn't think my post was all that long to get a TL;DR type response.

Was not wondering if SRT could be run in RAID 0, if it could, there wouldn't be any question that I would go with a SSD and a couple HDD in a raid 0 format. The question is more on how the SRT performs against a RAID 0. Is the SRT a legit form of tech and does actually perform better then a heavily common 2 drive RAID 0 setup.

[Fuzzykins]

Ah. Just misread, that's all. Your raid setup will perform better. SRT has been out for awhile, it's just Intel rebranding it.

[vesseblah]

SRT is just a very large HDD cache that works bit slower than real cache or real SSD. Problem is that when your most used data will not fit into the SRT's cache the performance drops from SSD level to HDD level.

For best performance the most reasonable way to go is still getting 120GB SSD and installing most used software there and then un-couple the WD Caviar Blacks' RAID0 as it wont be needed for porn collection only.

Here's a quick review and some benchmarks of the SRT in action.