Intel Smart Response Technology - SRT @ [H]

[FrgMstr]

Intel Smart Response Technology - SRT - Cache I/O isn't a new advancement in storage technology but does play a large role in the future of storage on many Intel systems. Today we look at Intel's new Smart Response Technology and give our thoughts while keeping an eye on the future of consumer storage advances.

 

[-Sn1PeR-]

Enthusiasts, I know it’s going to be difficult but wait for Intel’s "true" enthusiast platform to come out in six to eight months. Rumor has it that X79 will bring a revolutionary feature for your storage subsystem that is more significant than the introduction of SATA.

Go on...

First I've heard of this.

 

[Michaelius]

That screen with results from PC mark would be much more readable if results were accumulated per test category to have all HDD1 test on top then HDD2 etc since it's hard to read them the way they are arranged currently.

Also any chances for real life tests ? Before spending bucks on such thing I'd rather know if it will make application x loading y % faster. That's something that cannot be quintified from PCmark result (it only shows you what is faster but you don't know how much that thing would be helpfull in RL).

 

[ivansoze1]

EXTEMELY!! grateful for this article - Z68 motherboards from Giga have been available here for about a month
http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=138_711_1183
http://www.scorptec.com.au/computer/19/916/80
but there has been little detailed info - apart from prices(doh!!)
I hadn't bought anything excitingly new(Asus RT-N56U Dual Band router doesn't count - my IP made it redundant...another episode for another threadski...) since... it seems like forever - video cards have become a bit boring due to Duke baby being busy 'screwin' around for a few more months and the Dice guys are too busy playing BF3(plz, no spoilers..))...as for all those console ports....I have truly, truly had a go...buttseems all too too twitchy for old guy like moi..
We-e-ll, on Sunday I caved in anyway and bought a SB setup - Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD4-B3, 2600k and 8gig of Vegemite?. ram(yummy vegemite, mmmm) ..and..I'm excited!!!!!! SRT, nice 1!!! My daughter and sister-in-law both need PCs, so I have a valid excuse to buy some newish stuff - it was a buzz just to get some retail therapy - Giga advertise ' Touch bios Hybrid EFI technology' - as I haven't installed the board, I can't tell you WTH? it means(EFI with fancy name only?, normal bios and EFI ?, a mix of the 2?, either one if you want?,) but it will be fun to find out. I have been wanting to check EFI out - hope this is my opportunity??? Will report back when mission accomplished
So-o-o Kyle, thnx plenty - I haven't actually done anymore than look @the mobo and the(it seems) tiny SB cpu - love it, so err, cute?? (can blokes say 'cute'?)...a bit hmmm????? the ram has plasticy heatspreader(the aforementioned vegemite if it gets too hot mb?? ) but it looks good regardless and 4gig a stick???? In 1995, I got 2 extra megs of ram, to make a total of 4 whole megs fgs!!!! It was a crappy 386sx but 4 whole megs of ram meant i could play more games @last, woooohoooo!!! Got a 486 dx66 the next day, never used the 386 again...halt!!!! Sorry, going right OT..
Again, thanks Kyle and all [H] for your work, great timing for me!!! I will wack this baby together in the next few days and let you know how it all looks and feels once I decide which other pc gets gutted(probably this C2D e8400 sys) - has been record cold here, hope you are all ok out there in WWW...GL and good hunting(??)

 

[TechPirate]

Glad to see Chris Ram doing storage on [H]...great article.

 

[TeeJayHoward]

Go on...

First I've heard of this.

I wonder if they're talking about the "8 ports will be SATA and SAS"? Doesn't seem too exciting to me.

Or maybe it's the RSTe, which is... Uhh... RAID?

Honestly, X79's a little disappointing to me. No thunderbolt, no PCIe 3.0... Wonder if it even has USB 3.0 support? There'd better be SOMETHING special there.

 

[Corvette]

How does this affect the SSD's load leveling if you used a drive larger than 64 GB? Can SRT be used with HDD in raid?

Who's going to test a large cheap SSD in place of the HDD?

 

[ivansoze1]

It's all relative to where peeps are at with their PC adventures. For someone new to this it is all exciting, new tech always is...problem is, how much F@h or benching or wateva can you do before it all sends you bonkers? On the other hand, if you have just built your first rig(and realize Apple is just a fruit) and are learning the capabilities of SSDs, RAID, hybrid or whatever, it would be another interesting avenue to explore. I used to be a h/ware whooa, now it's something I can't just abandon... Plus my wife, despite what I may infer, likes me tinkering, as it keeps me @home and out of trouble...I had become cynical a while back, dropped a few b/s remarks, lost perspective...now..meh...enjoy the world, time is too short...sorry going OT again...
I may not always agree with the [H] but I do respect the work and appreciate the help provided..
I do have an 'on topic ' question - what is the difference between Z68A and Z68X....thnx again

 

[Stoly]

I'm not really sold on the SRT idea. Thing is that OS response is what benefits the most from an SSD and for $110 you can get a 60gb "boot SSD", if you need more space a 120gb drive will run for 200 bucks, that will probably cover for all your OS needs and most applications/games.

 

[Triple B]

Yeah, maybe I'm just not "getting" it, but while it sounds cool on paper, it seems like building a system with this included is somewhat pointless. I don't know that I'd want to sacrifice a portion of a large (expensive) SSD to boost speeds from my high-capacity HDD when I'll only really be using the HDD for music/movies and general storage. That's just MY perspective, though. Maybe someone else out there could find a good use for it. I mean, I wouldn't really scoff at it if I were buying a pre-built system that came with this feature set up, but I also wouldn't really be buying a pre-built system.

Regardless, it's an interesting development in technology, and that's always a pretty good thing.

 

[Dan_D]

Yeah, maybe I'm just not "getting" it, but while it sounds cool on paper, it seems like building a system with this included is somewhat pointless. I don't know that I'd want to sacrifice a portion of a large (expensive) SSD to boost speeds from my high-capacity HDD when I'll only really be using the HDD for music/movies and general storage. That's just MY perspective, though. Maybe someone else out there could find a good use for it. I mean, I wouldn't really scoff at it if I were buying a pre-built system that came with this feature set up, but I also wouldn't really be buying a pre-built system.

Regardless, it's an interesting development in technology, and that's always a pretty good thing.

You aren't supposed to sacrifice a portion of an SSD. You are supposed to use a smaller SSD with a limit of 64GB. Intel's SSD 311 for example is only 20GB. Intel also recommends using the technology on your OS drive if that drive or drives are conventional mechanical drives. If you use an SSD for your OS, then SRT isn't going to do you a lot of good. You could use it on large storage volumes but unless you use the same data set repeatedly, it will be of almost no value.

 

[Olle P]

Thing is that OS response is what benefits the most from an SSD and for $110 you can get a 60gb "boot SSD", if you need more space a 120gb drive will run for 200 bucks, that will probably cover for all your OS needs and most applications/games.

SRT is for when your $200 has to give you more storage space than 120GB.

How does this affect the SSD's load leveling if you used a drive larger than 64 GB?

Load levelling I don't know, but I suppose it's okay since the SSD will be divided into two parts; 64GB for the SRT and the rest available as a regular SSD partition.

The next limit has to be how intelligent the underlying software actually is. ... Intel’s solution doesn’t specifically call for a Single-Level Cell SSD but Intel choose to release a SLC SSD specifically for this reason. Due to its high cost, SLC is only used in enterprise class solid state drives these days and that leads me to believe the Intel Smart Response Technology isn’t all that gentle to the SSDs needs...

There's a much more plausible explanation for Intel's choice of SLC: Write speed! A 32GB MLC SSD isn't particularly fast at writing data compared to a regular HDD, and if the SSD used for SRT is writing slower than the HDD it's supposed to virtually speed up the resulting performance will suffer.

 

[qdemn7]

If you use an SSD for your OS, then SRT isn't going to do you a lot of good. You could use it on large storage volumes but unless you use the same data set repeatedly, it will be of almost no value.

Thanks for clarifying that. After using an SSD as my OS drive for the last 2 years, there is no way I could ever consider going back to a "spinner" hard drive. So from my perspective, SRT is about 3 years too late.

 

[iTYPE]

SRT yesterday Z68, what is this ... the Detroit Press. Makes me wanna snort some nitrous.

 

[Stoly]

SRT is for when your $200 has to give you more storage space than 120GB.

I think the $200 120gb SSD is more about performance than space, you can always get a 2tb HDD for cheap storage.

 

[Dan_D]

Thanks for clarifying that. After using an SSD as my OS drive for the last 2 years, there is no way I could ever consider going back to a "spinner" hard drive. So from my perspective, SRT is about 3 years too late.

In my opinion, this feature is better suited for mainstream use rather than the hardcore enthusiast. Again many enthusiasts, especially those who really care about storage performance will be using a dedicated SSD for their operating system installs. SSD caching could theoretically benefit large storage volumes but there are two caveats to that. One the data set must be used repeatedly for the cache to work. It's like Superfetch in that the algorithms need to determine what data gets used most frequently, and organize those data blocks on the cache drive for faster execution. With simple storage volumes which do not get read from or written to very often, the feature will be of almost no value.

Also, I tested this feature quite a bit myself before we branched this off into it's own article. It's a hard feature to benchmark based on how it works but one thing I noticed was a decrease in performance in sequential reads and writes. 4k, 4k QD32, and 8k writes are where all the improvements are shown. These improvements are huge once you've run the same data set more than once. This type of read / write / non-sequential access is typical of the usage pattern of an operating system volume, but is a-typical of storage volumes. So unless you watch the same exact videos, or run the same applications off your storage drive every day for example, you'd see no benefit from this technology.

I think the $200 120gb SSD is more about performance than space, you can always get a 2tb HDD for cheap storage.

That's what all current SSD's are about. They can't compete with conventional magnetic / mechanical hard drives in terms of raw storage space and price.

 

[Stoly]

Nice to see that the price premium over P67 is pretty slim. I'm glad I waited this long. Time to get an asrock Z68 Pro3

 

[FrgMstr]

I'm not really sold on the SRT idea. Thing is that OS response is what benefits the most from an SSD and for $110 you can get a 60gb "boot SSD", if you need more space a 120gb drive will run for 200 bucks, that will probably cover for all your OS needs and most applications/games.

So you agree 100% with our conclusion?

Yeah, maybe I'm just not "getting" it, but while it sounds cool on paper, it seems like building a system with this included is somewhat pointless.

Again, this is what we pointed out in the article, as Dan has said above. Enthusiasts just need to buy the SSDs. SSD "fee" for a mainstream budget build for an SI will be good.

Nice to see that the price premium over P67 is pretty slim. I'm glad I waited this long. Time to get an asrock Z68 Pro3

I am a bit shocked at home "inexpensive" the new Z68 board are, I expected a bit more of a premium.

Also, why would you buy an Asrock board when you have proven designs from MSI and ASUS there??

 

[Digital Viper-X-]

This technology sounds a lot like... the Momentus xt?

 

[Lazn_Work]

My understanding is that if you have a SSD larger than 64GB you can assign 64GB to SRT and use the rest of it as another drive letter..

So my thought is that a ~256 ish GB drive with 64 of it given over to SRT for your spinner drives and the rest used for the OS might be a prime setup. (especially if you can set SRT to not cache your OS partition)

 

[FrgMstr]

As a matter of fact I'm going for the Asrock Z68 Pro3M instead so I can get e-sata and save a few bucks.

How much?

 

[BallerX]

Sure this sounds spiffy and all. I just don't see the benefit of this system over a dedicated OS SSD. Not in price or performance.

However, I do have the urge to buy 2-4 Intel 20GB SLC SSDs for $110 a piece.

 

[sphinx99]

I like the tech but the price of the SSD is too high IMO.

 

[Silenus]

Sure this sounds spiffy and all. I just don't see the benefit of this system over a dedicated OS SSD. Not in price or performance.

However, I do have the urge to buy 2-4 Intel 20GB SLC SSDs for $110 a piece.

Perhaps what your missing is convenience?

Let say for example:
64GS SSD for OS/apps + 2TB Spinning Rust vs. 20GB larson creek + 2TB Spinning Rust. About the same price right? You can fit your OS and then a few heavily used apps and games. But 64GB is still not all that much. You have to manually decided what goes on it and what goes on the big drive. Then you have move data folder locations or make symbolic links, deal with drive letters ect. For enthusiasts like us not a big deal. But throw the SSD cache setup in there are now you simply have one simple 2TB drive that continually caches what you do use the most...even when that changes from time to time. There is no thinking or manual setup. That is the real difference here. I for one can see a good use for it when suggesting and or building systems for friends and family. They can gain some SSD like benefits but keep it SIMPLE.

 

[jzodda]

My understanding is that if you have a SSD larger than 64GB you can assign 64GB to SRT and use the rest of it as another drive letter..

So my thought is that a ~256 ish GB drive with 64 of it given over to SRT for your spinner drives and the rest used for the OS might be a prime setup. (especially if you can set SRT to not cache your OS partition)

That does sound good....

You can't use AHCI with SRT from what I read. How would that fact impact the setup you are suggesting?

 

[Highendtoys]

RAID mode has all of the AHCI goodies in it.

 

[Dan_D]

Sure this sounds spiffy and all. I just don't see the benefit of this system over a dedicated OS SSD. Not in price or performance.

However, I do have the urge to buy 2-4 Intel 20GB SLC SSDs for $110 a piece.

You are missing the point. There is no benefit to using SRT over a dedicated SSD for the OS.

I like the tech but the price of the SSD is too high IMO.

That's the whole point. SRT enables you to use a cheap SSD to boost the performance of your OS volume for SSD like performance with greater capacity and lower price.

Perhaps what your missing is convenience?

Let say for example:
64GS SSD for OS/apps + 2TB Spinning Rust vs. 20GB larson creek + 2TB Spinning Rust. About the same price right? You can fit your OS and then a few heavily used apps and games. But 64GB is still not all that much. You have to manually decided what goes on it and what goes on the big drive. Then you have move data folder locations or make symbolic links, deal with drive letters ect. For enthusiasts like us not a big deal. But throw the SSD cache setup in there are now you simply have one simple 2TB drive that continually caches what you do use the most...even when that changes from time to time. There is no thinking or manual setup. That is the real difference here. I for one can see a good use for it when suggesting and or building systems for friends and family. They can gain some SSD like benefits but keep it SIMPLE.

Well said.

My understanding is that if you have a SSD larger than 64GB you can assign 64GB to SRT and use the rest of it as another drive letter..

So my thought is that a ~256 ish GB drive with 64 of it given over to SRT for your spinner drives and the rest used for the OS might be a prime setup. (especially if you can set SRT to not cache your OS partition)

I don't know if you assign only part of an SSD for caching. I'll go back and look through the documentation but I'm almost certain it doesn't allow you to do that. It's basically the whole drive and that's it. In fact when you setup the SSD for caching, the drive disappears from the OS. It appears as part of the RAID array at that point but is otherwise inaccessible. Caching won't really help on just your data drives though. You get the most benefit from caching the OS. This is really targeted for people who want to buy a cheap SSD to cache their RAID 0 array, or their single drive and get pseudo SSD performance for their OS and applications. Nothing more, nothing less.

What you may be thinking of is that the caching software only uses up to 64GB of an SSD for caching. Additional space is wasted. I do not believe it's returned to the system for use. I'm verifying that now.

That does sound good....

You can't use AHCI with SRT from what I read. How would that fact impact the setup you are suggesting?

No you can't. The cache drive and mechanical drive are put together in a RAID of sorts. You have to enable the drive controller in RAID mode actually. No matter if you are using a single hard drive or multiples. If you want the cache feature, it has to operate in RAID mode which includes all the benefits of AHCI as well.

RAID mode has all of the AHCI goodies in it.

Right.

 

[Lazn_Work]

I don't know if you assign only part of an SSD for caching. I'll go back and look through the documentation but I'm almost certain it doesn't allow you to do that. It's basically the whole drive and that's it. In fact when you setup the SSD for caching, the drive disappears from the OS. It appears as part of the RAID array at that point but is otherwise inaccessible. Caching won't really help on just your data drives though. You get the most benefit from caching the OS. This is really targeted for people who want to buy a cheap SSD to cache their RAID 0 array, or their single drive and get pseudo SSD performance for their OS and applications. Nothing more, nothing less.

It is from here that I got this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching-review/2

"With the Z68 SATA controllers set to RAID (SRT won't work in AHCI or IDE modes) just install Windows 7 on your hard drive like you normally would. With Intel's RST 10.5 drivers and a spare SSD installed (from any manufacturer) you can choose to use up to 64GB of the SSD as a cache for all accesses to the hard drive. Any space above 64GB is left untouched for you to use as a separate drive letter."

edit: And I never install my games on my OS drive, so I'd want my game drive to be cached. This is because many of my games (especially older ones) don't need reinstalling with a OS reinstall, so keeping them separate speeds up recovery time from a OS install. (and if I had a big enough SSD the OS installed directly to the SSD = best)

 

[Dan_D]

I don't know that it does return extra space above 64GB to the OS especially given how the stuff works and how the drive completely disappears. I didn't try that exact test. I used the 20GB SSD 311 series drive.

 

[venm11]

Can someone tell me what the heck this is? With an article like that, you really, really need something concise and descriptive in the blurb so people know whether to bother reading it.

From the discussion, it sounds an awful lot like TurboCache or ReadyDrive.

 

[dderidex]

It's basically the whole drive and that's it. In fact when you setup the SSD for caching, the drive disappears from the OS. It appears as part of the RAID array at that point but is otherwise inaccessible.

This is mildly concerning.

With SSDs, it's a pretty important consideration of ownership of them that one must monitor the drive's health. Specifically, what SMART is reporting on the drive's usage and life cycle estimates.

If the sort-of-RAID-but-not controller is 'hiding' the drive from the OS...how will we get SMART reports from it to know that the SSD is dying, and it's time to replace it?

Seems kinda like this will make firmware updates of the SSD drives relatively impossible, too.

 

[Topaz]

Thanks for the article, although in my case I'd rather just spend the extra money for the full "SSD feel". I am very interested to hear more about X79, though...

 

[techSlave]

Nice article, Kyle. Thanks.

I'd like to install the OS and apps on a C300/256GB boot drive, then configure two SpinPoint-F2/2GB drives in RAID0 and have my data (primarily virtual machines containing development environments) reside on the RAID0 array.

I'm so glad Intel's SRT is at the block-level rather than the file level like Marvell's SSD caching approach! For my use this makes SSD caching much more valuable since my VM & data files are typically pretty large.

I read somewhere today (cant recall exactly where, there are so many new up) that 2-disk RAID0 arrays can be accelerated using a SRT SSD cache. Since my primary usage is more very-heavy-read load than write-intensive, I'd probably opt for a 64GB MLC SSD in 'ehanced' mode.

Do you know if this approach would work? My primary objective is to improve load-times of VMs. Would SRT on the RAID0 data array help here? Do you have any suggestions for configuring such a beast?

Thanks again for the informative article.

 

[Zok]

Page 3 - I can't click on any of the pictures for a larger image. Just me or is it broken?

 

[Dan_D]

This is mildly concerning.

With SSDs, it's a pretty important consideration of ownership of them that one must monitor the drive's health. Specifically, what SMART is reporting on the drive's usage and life cycle estimates.

If the sort-of-RAID-but-not controller is 'hiding' the drive from the OS...how will we get SMART reports from it to know that the SSD is dying, and it's time to replace it?

Seems kinda like this will make firmware updates of the SSD drives relatively impossible, too.

SMART reporting and status information is still readable in the Intel Rapid Storage Technology software. The drive just doesn't show up in the storage management console any longer.

 

[Dan_D]

Nice article, Kyle. Thanks.

I'd like to install the OS and apps on a C300/256GB boot drive, then configure two SpinPoint-F2/2GB drives in RAID0 and have my data (primarily virtual machines containing development environments) reside on the RAID0 array.

I'm so glad Intel's SRT is at the block-level rather than the file level like Marvell's SSD caching approach! For my use this makes SSD caching much more valuable since my VM & data files are typically pretty large.

I read somewhere today (cant recall exactly where, there are so many new up) that 2-disk RAID0 arrays can be accelerated using a SRT SSD cache. Since my primary usage is more very-heavy-read load than write-intensive, I'd probably opt for a 64GB MLC SSD in 'ehanced' mode.

Do you know if this approach would work? My primary objective is to improve load-times of VMs. Would SRT on the RAID0 data array help here? Do you have any suggestions for configuring such a beast?

Thanks again for the informative article.

I don't think it will help a whole lot in your case. The problem is that the VM's are essentially large files and the technology is designed around 4k and 8k reads / writes. Sequential read / write performance often suffers using SRT. There are times where larger 512k reads and writes show some improvement, but it isn't the massive increase we see on 4k / 4K QD32 / 8k reads and writes. Then again if the data is relatively static and you read it often, you might see some improvement, but I don't know if it will be enough to justify the cost of the SSD. A 20GB SSD 311 series drive maybe. A 64GB SLC drive? I doubt it.

It is unfortunate that my server is so severely dated and won't support SRT. I've got VM's on it too and I'd love to see the results of such a test myself just to be sure. That same server also stores media for my HTPC. All in all it would make a good test bed for SRT excluding the fact that it's old hardware. (Intel D5400XS, dual QX9775's).

 

[ob1]

I like the sound of this technology very much, specifically for my son and wife's computer. Now I don't have to buy and help manage the pure SSD, or worse explain to my wife why she can't install such and such on the C: drive.

I would have a few questions though, if you review guys are listening. Like could I have an installed OS, and then add the small 20GB SSD later and then enable the SRT? I know you mentioned it in the article, but I have seen some ambiguity on whether this does block or file caching? For instance, if I update an OS file, does the cache actually get updated or does it have to wait until that file is used three or four times? I agree it sounds a lot like the Momentus XT, which I have in our floater laptop and it works very very well.

 

[techSlave]

I don't think it will help a whole lot in your case. The problem is that the VM's are essentially large files and the technology is designed around 4k and 8k reads / writes. Sequential read / write performance often suffers using SRT. There are times where larger 512k reads and writes show some improvement, but it isn't the massive increase we see on 4k / 4K QD32 / 8k reads and writes. Then again if the data is relatively static and you read it often, you might see some improvement, but I don't know if it will be enough to justify the cost of the SSD. A 20GB SSD 311 series drive maybe. A 64GB SLC drive? I doubt it.

It is unfortunate that my server is so severely dated and won't support SRT. I've got VM's on it too and I'd love to see the results of such a test myself just to be sure. That same server also stores media for my HTPC. All in all it would make a good test bed for SRT excluding the fact that it's old hardware. (Intel D5400XS, dual QX9775's).

Interesting, thanks for the response, Dan. I would have thought a larger cache would result in a higher cache hit-rate. That's why I was hoping a fairly inexpensive but larger mid-range MLC might be better than a smaller write-optimized setup like the 311 seems to be.

I do see your point that the VMDK files attempting to be cached involved are pretty big, though. That's one reason I'm excited about the block-level caching going on - only the relevant (accessed) portions of the file would be cached. And since I use a lot of VM cloning, I was hoping the important portions of the clone source file would be even better cached since it's hit a lot, probably in consistent patterns. I load/unload VM's (run builds, regression tests, etc) a LOT and am badly I/O bound on the input side, it really slows down the VM load.

Currently I'm creating a sort of poor-man's caching scheme. I put the clone source on a SSD and the derivatives on a RAID0 array; this really does speed things up dramatically over a pure HDD scenario, although I haven't timed it. It also has the side-benefit of diverting VM writes to the HDD, leaving the SSD essentially read-only, not wearing the SSD at all. It's pretty cool stuff, but a management chore.

Maybe the ideal situation is to keep the above setup, clone source on the boot SSD, the derivatives (there are a lot of these) on the HDD array with SRT caching. Thanks for jogging my brain on that. Anything to save time would pay off big for me since some days that's all I do, over and over and over. I guess there's one way to find out. Maybe once my hardware arrives tomorrow I'll steal the 64GB SSD from my HTPC (backed up nightly to the WHS), set the SSD up as a cache drive, run a few tests, time them, then restore the SSD back to the HTPC... A $0-cost test. I'll be happy post up the numbers up here if/when I get that far if anyone's interested.

 

[sphinx99]

That's the whole point. SRT enables you to use a cheap SSD to boost the performance of your OS volume for SSD like performance with greater capacity and lower price.

I should have explained better. Their 20GB SSDs are too expensive. In the marketplace, people look for numbers. What they are going to see is "20GB for $100 or 64GB for $100" ad you can guess how they are going to vote. I do think this technology is compelling for read-acceleration, but I think it belongs as a low-cost motherboard-integrated option for lower end platforms. No one seeking a Z68 is going to care for this, and those looking at more affordable platforms are going to feel some serious sticker shock at Intel's tiny and expensive SLC slice. This might go over better with the general public if VARs take a somewhat Apple-esque approach and simply integrate a 30GB or 40GB MLC bank right onto low cost motherboards.

 

[techSlave]

I should have explained better. Their 20GB SSDs are too expensive. In the marketplace, people look for numbers. What they are going to see is "20GB for $100 or 64GB for $100" ad you can guess how they are going to vote. I do think this technology is compelling for read-acceleration, but I think it belongs as a low-cost motherboard-integrated option for lower end platforms. No one seeking a Z68 is going to care for this, and those looking at more affordable platforms are going to feel some serious sticker shock at Intel's tiny and expensive SLC slice. This might go over better with the general public if VARs take a somewhat Apple-esque approach and simply integrate a 30GB or 40GB MLC bank right onto low cost motherboards.

I remember seeing spy photos on a Taiwanese site a few months ago that had a space for a mSATA drive to be installed directly to a Z68 prototype motherboard. That starts to make more sense in this context...