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© Copyright 2012 by Peter Murawski. All rights reserved.

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I recently upgraded my computer to an Intel i5-2500K system with the Asus Maximus IV GENE-Z motherboard. It includes Intel’s latest chipset, Z68. Its main feature is that it includes all the best features of the enthusiast-class P67 chipset (overclocking), plus the features of the H67 chipset (integrated video). For gamers, this is not a big selling point, but the other major features of the Z68 is all new. The Z68 chipset features the ability to use a solid-state drive (SSD) as a cache for a larger mechanical drive using Intel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT). SRT will take an SSD of up to 64 GB and use it as a transparent cache, storing the most frequently used blocks so that they can be accessed from the solid-state drive instead of the mechanical drive. This means that you can accelerate a large boot drive to try to get the best of both the solid-state and magnetic storage worlds.

Seagate has done something like this already in an integrated drive. Their Momentus XT line of notebook hard drives include a 7200 RPM mechanical drive of up to 500 GB along with 4 GB of solid-state flash memory for caching. I have one of these drives in my laptop and it does make a noticeable difference on boot. I was therefore pretty excited to be able to do this with a larger drive on my desktop. However, after spending a few hours with it today, I’ve yet to be able to get it working.

For starters, this wasn’t exactly a plug-and-play solution for me. While the SSD works fine by itself, in order to use SRT with Intel’s drivers you need to have your SATA controller in RAID mode which, unfortunately, I did not have. Admittedly this is my fault—I left it in AHCI mode when I reinstalled my OS last month—but it is a bit of a pain to reconfigure. First, you have to change your registry so that Windows will actually boot in the new SATA mode. Microsoft has a convenient fix for this which you can get here, so this part was pretty easy using their Fix It tool. I then had to reboot, then reboot again as Windows reinstalled all the storage drivers. Still, Intel’s configuration tool wasn’t detecting the drives properly, so it was off to the Asus web site to see if I needed to update anything. I already had the latest drivers installed, so I ended up reinstalling them and that seemed to fix the problem.

I say “seemed” because, while I was able to get the tool to see the drive and allow me to start setting up SRT acceleration, it just won’t work! I can’t tell if it’s some problem with the drivers, with the operating system, with the SSD, or somethign else entirely… but whenever I try to configure my SSD as a cache for any other drive in my system, it sit there for a while then fails with an “unknown error.” I don’t really want to have to reinstall the operating system, since if I do that I might as well just install it directly on the SSD. But until I figure this out I’m not be very impressed by SRT. I hope it’s not an incompatibility with the SSD.

The moral of the story is: always install Windows with your SATA controller in RAID mode so you don’t have to waste so much time reconfiguring your operating system.

Edit: Alright, I just got it working. I didn’t do anything differently, but I did install windows to the drive on another PC before re-connecting it to my main PC for use as an SRT cache. Seems to be working fine now. Finnicky technology, I guess.