Boot drive vs. SRT - Performance?

[flydigital]

Hi all,

I haven't yet jumped into SSD but about to.. I am curious about SRT performance. Can anyone point to benches or provide their opinion on performance results comparing it to a boot drive setup?

The decision for me is a factor obviously because of price but also I have near 300GB of actively-used applications and caching seems to make sense if the performance gain is significant.

Finally, is there a way to use boot SSD + SRT SSD + platter configuration? I.e. 128GB SSD + 64GB SSD caching a 1.5TB HD, for the best of both worlds?

I looked around and could not find solid answers to my questions, sorry if I overlooked anything. Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[taltamir]

Finally, is there a way to use boot SSD + SRT SSD + platter configuration? I.e. 128GB SSD + 64GB SSD caching a 1.5TB HD, for the best of both worlds?

There is no technical reason it shouldn't. It is possible for intel to have bungled up the driver badly enough to make such a limitation but:
1. Someone would have raised a stink by now.
2. I don't think intel is that incompetent.

For actual proof
http://download.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/intel_smart_response_technology_user_guide.pdf

See point 11 specifically. Where it discusses your choosing which of several SSDs to use...

In fact it appears that you could even go with a configuration of 1x128GB SSD + 1.5TB HDD where 20GB (or 40, or your choice) of the SSD is used to SRT cache the HDD and the rest is used as a boot drive (it will appear as a RAID0 array of a single drive according to intel documentations due to how hybrid raid is implemented)

As for performance. A standalone SSD gets higher performance, but a cache SSD applies that extra performance to more data.
Here is a specific review http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching-review/4
Look at the charts at the bottom of the page showing the vertex (SSD) vs non cached Seagate HDD, vs cached Seagate HDD. (the ones at top of page only compare different methods of caching to each other)

 

[flydigital]

Thank you, that's very helpful!