Asus SSD caching on P67

[qbanb8582]

For anyone that is interested in SSD caching its possible to do it on Asus boards that have the Marvell Sata 3.0 ports. One nice thing that about Asus's SSD caching is theres no limit on the capacity. I"m currently running it on a P8P67 WS Revolution board. I currently have a 500GB WD Caviar Blue with an Intel X-25M 80GB. This is not my boot drive but a drive that I have steam and other games. I did notice significant speed increases when it comes to loading games. For anyone interested in it heres what I did.

1. Get the Marvell drivers, I get them from the P9X79 Pro section, not sure if this is needed or not. I downloaded those drivers anyways.

2. Download the Ai Suite from the P9X79 Pro section, and install it.

3. In the Ai suite app, under tools theres an Asus SSD Caching. Just click enable caching and it does all the work. Depending on the drive size the amount of time for it initially complete may vary.

 

[JermWerty]

I will have to try this with my 60GB SSD and 1.5TB Seagate. Just not enough room on 60GB. Though I am eyeing a 120GB and not dealing with caching at all... I wonder what the actual performance gain is for say BF3 map loads with the cache mode?

 

[MrCaffeineX]

I noticed a huge performance boost for booting Windows 7 Ultimate and game loads (currently WoW and Skyrim) with the SSD caching on my Z68-based board. I used the same Seagate 500GB SATA 6.0Gbps and added the SSD later for comparison, then left it there. I went from approximately 45 second boots to 15 seconds or so and 6 to 8 second game loads to near-instant game loads. I like it because the rig is portable and comes with me where I go. 30 seconds may not seem like much, but it does a pretty good job of impressing your friends when you get together for LAN gaming.

I'm not sure what the differences are between the operation of the ASUS utility and Intel's RST utility, but it would seem logical that with more cache area more applications should have more data cached, therefore load faster, though at some point I imagine you're right that you may as well just have everything on one large SSD.

What I am more curious about is the longevity of an SSD used as a cache drive compared to an SSD used as a boot/programs drive. Is there enough of a difference in their write-patterns to noticeably affect lifespan one way or the other? I guess I'll find out eventually...

 

[qbanb8582]

I will have to try this with my 60GB SSD and 1.5TB Seagate. Just not enough room on 60GB. Though I am eyeing a 120GB and not dealing with caching at all... I wonder what the actual performance gain is for say BF3 map loads with the cache mode?

I doubt you'll see gains in performance as far as framerate. I would think loading would be faster.

But on MW3 for the campaign it was loaded usually by the end of the cinematic sequence. With it cached its loaded well before the cinematics are done. Not a real scientific method but I did notice a difference in load times across the board. It usually 45 seconds to load before and now loads in like 10 seconds.

 

[qbanb8582]

I noticed a huge performance boost for booting Windows 7 Ultimate and game loads (currently WoW and Skyrim) with the SSD caching on my Z68-based board. I used the same Seagate 500GB SATA 6.0Gbps and added the SSD later for comparison, then left it there. I went from approximately 45 second boots to 15 seconds or so and 6 to 8 second game loads to near-instant game loads. I like it because the rig is portable and comes with me where I go. 30 seconds may not seem like much, but it does a pretty good job of impressing your friends when you get together for LAN gaming.

I'm not sure what the differences are between the operation of the ASUS utility and Intel's RST utility, but it would seem logical that with more cache area more applications should have more data cached, therefore load faster, though at some point I imagine you're right that you may as well just have everything on one large SSD.

What I am more curious about is the longevity of an SSD used as a cache drive compared to an SSD used as a boot/programs drive. Is there enough of a difference in their write-patterns to noticeably affect lifespan one way or the other? I guess I'll find out eventually...

The only difference I was able to see between Intel and Asus is that there is not capacity limit of 60GB like intel. Which in theory would let you cache more data which could be the difference in amount of things cached.

As far as longevity I couldn't say, but I really don't care. Currently I'm using two 60GB SSDs in raid 0 for my boot drive and have my 500GB drive cached with an 80GB SSD.

I'm hooked on SSDs now. If it dies I'll get another one. Atleast with caching if the drive dies the data on isn't lost on that drive.

 

[qbanb8582]

I will have to try this with my 60GB SSD and 1.5TB Seagate. Just not enough room on 60GB. Though I am eyeing a 120GB and not dealing with caching at all... I wonder what the actual performance gain is for say BF3 map loads with the cache mode?

I wasn't going to at first because I wasn't going to upgrade from a P67 to Z68 just for SSD caching.

I already use SSDs as my boot drive. But I wanted a speed boost to my data drive. It showed a noticeable difference.