Intel have incorporating Smart Response Technology with the new Z68 chipset. In essence this operates by combining a standard (mechanical) HDD with an SSD. The SSD is then used as the cache drive whilst the traditional mechanical HDD is used as the OS drive. The idea is that recalling data and files will be much more efficient in daily use and this will speed things up for the end user.

So to test this we have paired a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB 7200RPM SATA drive with a Kingston V+ 64GB SSD. The Operating system will be installed on the Samsung drive and the SSD will act as the cache drive.



To get this setup we need to follow the following steps in order for everything to work correctly. So here it is:

• Boot into BIOS and change PCH SATA Control Mode to RAID (XHD) - under Integrated Peripherals.
• Install OS onto Samsung Spinpoint 1TB drive.
• Boot into Windows and install Intel Rapid Storage Technology via Diver CD
• Load up Intel Rapid Storage Technology. Select Accelerate Tab. Click Enable Acceleration,
• Select chosen options from screen - Enhanced or Maxmized acceleration mode.



Benchmarks - PCMark 7, Windows 7 Boot Time & Large File Copy

Next we ran some benchmarks to determine how much SSD caching actually affects our real-world experience. The first test sees the new PCMark 7 being used - more specifically the System Storage Suite that gives us an overall score. After this the Windows 7 boot time was observed via a stopwatch in each of the modes and finally a large file copy of 5.91GB was transferred to the Samsung drive using each of the modes - Enhanced, Maxmized, Disabled.