Anyone still using SRT (caching) drives? Thoughts?

[John721]

Hi all,

I was toying around with the notion of using an SSD with Smart Response Technology (SRT) on a new Z77 I7 build along with possibly a 2TB or 3TB mechanical drive. I'm hoping to get a fairly straight forward storage setup with the speed advantages of SSD for commonly used stuff, good storage capacity, and reasonable costs.

I'm wondering if anyone has been using an SRT cache drive for a while now and could maybe weigh in with some thoughts on how it's been performing over time. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

[mwroobel]

If you can afford a full-fledged SSD of at least 120GB (well, you can get a smaller drive but 120GB is a comfortable size) you would be far better served getting it and making it your OS drive with as many apps as you can reasonably fit (leave at least 10% free at all times if you can) as opposed to doing the cache drive SRT thing.

 

[zandor]

I'm wondering the same thing, though I'm not considering one as a boot drive. I've got a couple 128GB M4s, but I'm thinking about adding a smaller SSD to cache a HD for my Steam directory. I don't want to spend $400 or whatever on a 512GB SSD but want speed for the games I've been playing a lot lately.

 

[westrock2000]

I'm wondering the same thing, though I'm not considering one as a boot drive. I've got a couple 128GB M4s, but I'm thinking about adding a smaller SSD to cache a HD for my Steam directory. I don't want to spend $400 or whatever on a 512GB SSD but want speed for the games I've been playing a lot lately.

You could use "mklink" command to create a copy on the SSD and then redirect windows to that copy from the original location. This way the data is physically on another drive, but as far as installation paths are concerned its still on the original disk.

So you could have your games sitting on some 1TB drive which is what the Start menu or Steam points to when you load the game. But then you copy the game to an SSD and use mklink to trick windows into pulling the data from the SSD, while everything appears to be coming from the 1TB drive. So the game loads fast, but you dont have to worry about installs getting messed up.

 

[GotNoRice]

The technology really works great. It's a shame most people aren't even willing to give it a chance. You really do get the SSD experience with none of the hassle.

You can make use of an SSD that would otherwise be too small to install onto directly. Alternatively, if you use an SSD larger than 64GB it will allow you to use the remaining space directly. You would then have the best of both worlds where you could have most stuff on the cached hard drive with 95% of the performance of running on the SSD directly and still put those few games that you are anal about on the SSD directly for that last few extra %.

 

[John721]

That's what I was hoping for. According to HardOCP's own article on it, the speed boosts once you get cached are pretty impressive, and apparently it doesn't take too many program runs to do it either.

I was thinking about an Intel 520 series for the cache drive.

 

[zandor]

I suspect one reason a lot of people are hesitant to try it is they're worried about it breaking and losing their data.

I think I'll give it a try. My Steam folder going boom wouldn't be a big disaster. I've got 20Mbit+ cable and most games dump your saves into your user profile anyway. The next question is what to use as a cache? I'm kind of looking at these:

OCZ Synapse Cache 64GB $70 - $20 MIR
Crucial M4 64GB $70
Samsung 830 64GB $85
Intel 313 20GB $110

The last one's an SLC drive that Intel markets for HD caching. It's write endurance is a lot higher than any of the others. I think it's unnecessary for my application so I'll probably get something cheaper.

 

[lazybummm]

The OCZ Synase 64gb is overprovisioned so it only has 32gb capacity if I am not mistaken. Also the synapse is great for non z68/z77 platforms because it comes with cache software.

 

[GotNoRice]

I suspect one reason a lot of people are hesitant to try it is they're worried about it breaking and losing their data.

The potential for data loss is pretty low with SRT. The data in cache is still also on the mechanical drive, so even if the SSD completely failed your data would still be fully intact. You could even cache a Raid1 or Raid5 setup of mechanical HDDs to add redundancy to the mix. It's also nice because you can swap SSDs in about 5 minutes without losing any data. Just disable cache, swap SSD, enable cache, done

The OCZ Synase 64gb is overprovisioned so it only has 32gb capacity if I am not mistaken. Also the synapse is great for non z68/z77 platforms because it comes with cache software.

You can select a value of 18.6GB or 64GB for SRT caching. If the SSD is smaller than 64GB and you select the 64GB option it will simply use the entire drive.

 

[ob1]

Yeah, I don't get why people are against the SRT solution. I use it on my son's rig, and wish I had it on mine to be honest. There are two settings, one is like read only cache and the other is read/write. I use the read only one on my son's rig. So if the SSD dies, the system would still be able to boot and run as normal, just without the caching. His system on boot is nearly as fast as mine with a dedicated SSD, I would estimate about 5 seconds slower on boot due to the raid controller, (which I have disabled). However, his system caches everything, meaning that when we are gaming, and I have a game on a normal spinner, his level loads and so forth are instant where mine are grinding on that damn noisy caviar black. I would actually say his system is better off with the caching than mine, (until I get a fancy new 500GB drive and put everyone on it)...