Question: Building a new system with a 120GB SSD and a 1TB 7200 RPM HDD (windows 7 OS).Originally I was going to use the SSD as the boot drive and the HDD for additional storage, but then I started reading about Intel’s Smart Response technology (which is supported by my motherboard).
My question is, does it make more sense to use Smart Response (with the HDD as the boot drive) or should I make the SSD the boot drive with the HDD as a secondary (I would regularly backup important files from the SSD to the HDD). Or is there another, even better, solution (e.g. using Smart Response with the SSD as the boot drive)?
Answer: I recently built a PC and enabled “Smart Response Technology” with a “Sandy Bridge” CPU. That is, a 2T mechanical drive and a 50G SSD. You plug both drives into the fastest SATA ports and build the OS (and all data) onto the mechanical C: drive. After all this works, enable the Smart Response feature in the special Intel app. It will tell you C: is accelerated and you will see no evidence of the SSD in the file manager. By the way, you need a special motherboard that enables this feature.
I also have another PC (also home built), that uses a previous generation Nehalem CPU. This has a dedicated 160G SSD as C: and a 2T mechanical drive as D:. That is, the OS is natively on the real SSD.
Performance? The new PC with Smart Response is faster than the PC with the dedicated SSD system. Both are fast, but the disk caching works well. I know this isn’t a perfect comparison, but I wouldn’t hesitate to do Smart Response. By the way, supposedly, the SSD cache can be ~30G and work well. No need to go bigger.
Full disclosure (in case someone tracks down my IP address), I work at Intel. However, my business is not PC’s. This is just personal experience.