SRT to cache a non-OS drive?

[Toschek]

Hello -

I've got a crucial m4 512 running my OS and absolutely no complaints.

I've also got a 3tb seagate 7200rpm drive and an Intel 311 drive which I'd like to accelerate via SRT.

I'm running on an ASUS Maximus gene-iv/gen 3, latest IRST 10.8.0.1003 installed.

I am able to see the caching drive, and the standard drive. I can see the accelerate button, and when I click through the menu I've attempted turning it on enhanced mode and maximized mode.

The SRT raid volume was created, but it is not "sticking" to the 3tb drive no matter what I do.

Obviously the 3tb drive is formatted as GPT, also it's currently set as a dynamic disk (if that matters).

I do a lot of recording on this machine (music), and to be able to record using the SSD caching would be quite helpful with my throughput.

Is this possible? Any pointers on getting this going?

 

[Chainzsaw]

Read this here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4337/z68-ssd-caching-with-corsairs-f40-sandforce-ssd/2

Especialliy this quote:

"To start with, let's look at how the Corsair Force F40 and Intel SSD 311 stack up. Remember that the F40 is based on SandForce's SF-1200 controller, meaning it gains its high performance by using real-time compression and deduplication techniques to reduce what it actually writes to NAND. Data that can easily be compressed is written as quickly as possible, while data that isn't as compressible goes by much slower. As a cache the drive is likely to encounter data from both camps, although Intel's SRT driver does filter out sequential file operations so large incompressible movies and images should be kept out of the cache altogether."

For what your asking may be possible, it may actually not work due to the type of data you want to "accelerate".

IMO a better option would be to make your Intel 311 as a seperate drive - and dump the files you want to work with on there.

That would give you 100% of the speed of the SSD 100% of the time.

SRT is mainly for caching frequently used Programs/OS files. It's not really meant for compressed data (video, music, etc).

 

[nukemaster]

I am with the above poster.

Since SRT works best with data that is accessed often, even in maximized mode(to speed up writes) your results will be hit and miss.

The SSD as a working drive for the files you wish to edit is a better idea. Since the files are generally bigger to start with you can have all your files awaiting edit/compression and write them off to a hard drive after. In general, a hard drives sequential writes are just file for that application(assuming you are not reading and writing other data to the same hard drive while compressing/encoding files.).