Smart response technology and Raid

[Ernie Twintle]

Hello,

I have a P8Z77-V mobo and am considering buying a 64Gb SSD to use as a cache for the SRT Technology. I see that you are required to configure your SATA drives as RAID in the BIOS.

I have 3 SATA drives already and use the PC for audio only, one drive is the system drive, one for Samples and one for direct recording onto disk through Cubase. My question is, if I set this to RAID, will all my disks function as before? ie. as seperate independent disks? Sorry, don't know much about RAID or the different configs.

Thanks in advance

 

[Dereck47]

No, you don't create a RAID array. The ports your HDD & SSD are connected to have to be in RAID mode.

 

[Ernie Twintle]

Thank you for replying so quickly. I have been reading a few other posts here and there seems to be a consensus on not mixing ssd and a hdd in RAID. As you mention that they will be set to RAID mode and not in a RAID Array, does this matter?

Would a better idea be to buy a 124gb ssd and use that as the OS / programme disk instead and do without the SRT setup?

Thanks again.

 

[Dereck47]

Thank you for replying so quickly. I have been reading a few other posts here and there seems to be a consensus on not mixing ssd and a hdd in RAID. As you mention that they will be set to RAID mode and not in a RAID Array, does this matter?

Yes, when you create a RAID array you should never mix SSDs and HDDs. The Read/Write performance of a RAID array is based upon the drive in the array with the slowest Read/Write speeds. So your RAID would work but the capability of your SSD would not be used.

When you create a RAID array you do 2 steps:
1.) Change your SATA ports to RAID mode
2.) Go into your RAID BIOS and select which drives will be part of your array

When you're using Intel SRT you just do Step 1. You then boot into Windows, run the SRT software and select the SSD you're going to use as your cache drive. So SRT is similar but not the same thing as an actual RAID array.

The purpose of a cache drive is to give SSD-like performance to a HDD with an O/S on it. It's basically for people who can't afford a large capacity SSD.

If you can afford a 120GB or larger SSD then forget about Intel SRT. Just install your O/S and programs on the SSD.