Can we manually cache on smart response?

Starfish75

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Aug 9, 2012
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I have just purchased a gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H motherboard, which uses smart response technology. I have also purchased a Samsung SSD 128gb which is too large to use smart response. I want to cache slow loading software as opposed to software I use regularly. As smart response would do. I want to cache Sims 2 and Supreme Commander 2. Which both take forever to load. Supreme Commander 2 is sitting on an external drive where my steam account resides. Can I manually cache software on the SSD, for sims 2 and can I raid multiple drives including external drives and manually select Supreme Commander 2 to cache? Sorry about the long confusing question.
 
Solution
srt only will address 60gb.

So you should partition your SSD, so that 60gb will be used for SRT (or however much you want). Then the rest you can use as regular storage, and you put files you want to be faster there.

I don't know if SRT is dumb or smart though, and if it duplicate effort and copy files from the user partition into the SRT partition even though it's on the same SSD. I would think yes, but no big deal...

Look up "mklink steam" to learn how to move your Steam games around to different locations.


Or like you said, just get a 60gb srt and let the cache handle itself...

Starfish75

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Aug 9, 2012
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Sorry about this being in the wrong section, my iPad doesn't load all categories. Can a moderator move this to the correct section.

P.s. I am considering buying a cheaper, smart response compatable SSD if I can manually select some software to be cached from external and internal drives.
 

raytseng

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May 15, 2012
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srt only will address 60gb.

So you should partition your SSD, so that 60gb will be used for SRT (or however much you want). Then the rest you can use as regular storage, and you put files you want to be faster there.

I don't know if SRT is dumb or smart though, and if it duplicate effort and copy files from the user partition into the SRT partition even though it's on the same SSD. I would think yes, but no big deal...

Look up "mklink steam" to learn how to move your Steam games around to different locations.


Or like you said, just get a 60gb srt and let the cache handle itself...
 
Solution

Starfish75

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Aug 9, 2012
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Yes this is very useful information. I have looked up mklink on YouTube and this actually solves an older problem of constantly buying bigger drives to handle Steam content.  It also means that I can put slow loading Supreme Commander 2 on a 128gb SSD and have the rest of my Steam based games on an external 1tb hard drive.  I have not been able to test it out since I have another issue.

I have just built a new pc and I am a novice.  It seems the Gigabyte Z77 D3H has power management issues where plugging in lots of devices fans, graphics card, hard drives causes it not to work.  So adding a smart response SSD may not be an option.  I'm not going to get a chance to investigate this till later this week.  I think this may deserve a separate thread and only after I play around.  Since the problem may be the power supply or the graphics card.

Thank you both for your input really useful information from both of you.
 

Traciatim

Distinguished


FYI, you set a volume to be accelerated and can not SRT an SSD. So there is no way to SRT a partition of an SSD and it will not attempt to cache data already on the usable area of the SSD.

The main problem I see with this plan is the overuse of the SRT'd area of the SSD which may cause premature failure since static data will be taking up certain areas not allowing the wear leveling to work properly. It's probably not that big of a concern with current SSDs, but it's the reason companies make cache specific SSDs that have much more aggressive over provisioning.