With the recent release of the Z68 chipset I’ve been debating finally upgrading from the over 4 year old Q6600 to something more recent.
What caught my eye was the Smart Response Technology, which allows a SSD to cache hard disk data. That gives two possible strategies for a new build.
Option 1 - traditional approach, total £300+.
120GB SSD of some kind with 6Gb interface (£172+ depending on model)
2x2TB WD Green mirrored for data (£64 ea)
Option 2 - SRT approach, total £303+.
60GB SSD (£73+ depending on model)
2x2TB WD Black mirrored for system+data (£115 ea)
Prices from ebuyer just for indication, I haven’t shopped around for best pricing at this stage. Both options would cost near enough the same. I’d go for the WD Black if it was a system disk, but the Green would be good enough for pure data application.
SSD sizes were chosen for the application. For my main system currently OS+programs take some 70GB. So rounding up with breathing space I think that has to be a 120GB model if I did that. On the cache side, it only works up to 64GB so there’s no point going above that.
Option 1 would probably give the best general performance and lowest risk of anything funny happening, at the small cost I have to manage what gets saved where a bit more carefully. And the Green drives are slightly quieter and cooler too. Option 2 is if I’m feeling rather lazy and don’t want to manage that and backups of the separate SSD.
Hmm… anyone want to buy my X6 box to help pay for this? 
Couple of points to consider 
SRT is limited to 40GB iirc so no point getting an SSD larger than that. Also the caching performance is approximately half way between standard hdd speeds and full ssd speeds… so you’ll definately get more benefit from a pure SSD.
Second point is regarding the “Black” WD drives… If these are the SATA-3 6GB/s drives then they’re pretty much pointless paying the extra for imho. A mechanical drive cannot and will not saturate a SATA-2 bus, let alone a SATA-3… there’s just no benefit of paying the premium unless you’re out of SATA-2 ports.
I’d definately go for option 1… better response times and quieter more efficient storage.
Option 2 with standard SATA-2 drives would be cheaper though with a 40GB SSD in front of SATA-2 hdd’s
WD Black are 7200 rpm and higher performance drives. Green are lower speed (officially I can’t find a number) and optimised for low power/noise.
I thought the limit for SRT was 64GB hence me looking at 60/64GB models if I went that route. There is a 3rd option actually, to add the cache drive in addition in option 1, assuming it can be configured not to cache the main SSD and only work on the “data” drive. Data is data, but some of it may be more frequently requested… but I assume that can be done at a later date regardless.
I was leaning towards option 1… but which SSD to go for? So many choices…
Hmmm you may be right about the 64GB, can’t remember where I read it now.
I stand by my comments on the drives though, especially as you’re mirroring them you’ll get a speed boost over a single drive on reads anyway
Up to you though, you know the use of the machine more than me 
In all honesty I do not like these sort of systems benchmarks don’t reflect true use IMV all the double/tripple file handling as it picks up files /drops files based on usage habits those habits are different to using the same unchanging data of a benchmark environment.
End of the day if the speed is required you place it on the SSD
In a hybrid mode you end up hammering the SSD like a pagefile if your accessing alot of files on the Hardrives. Any fresh data is still subject to being written out at the speed of the HDD.
You can have a bigger drive than 64Gb on SRT but the software limits to a 64gb caching system. you could still partition the drive and use the other partitions.
SRT is (supposed) to cache only the most frequently accessed data, not necessarily the most recent, so for reads it offers a fair amount of potential. Writes do seem to be a weakness, but they are generally less often/common than reads I suspect.
Right now I’m digging through benchmarks and value to choose between OCZ Vertex 3 and Crucial M4 drives as main drive. Former is “faster” in more scenarios but costs more per capacity. But how significant is that difference in practice?..
The green power drives are suprisingly fast - even 5400rpm drives, they outperformed my old 7,200 hard drive due to the platter density.
I’m more than familiar with the Greens, I have 6x1TB and 1x2TB already! They are measurably significantly slower than Black though in both sustained transfer and seek times.
I’ve put the order for the bits in now. Went for the Vertex 3 in the end. 1st wave of bits arriving tomorrow.
Ah, sorry, didn’t know.
I never had a Black to compare to, just my old Fujitsu.
Think I’ll fully commission the new box on the weekend. The final disk strategy I’ve settled on is as follows:
OCZ Vertex 3 120GB - system
WD Green 2TB (mirrored) - recent data
WD Green 2TB (single) - externally backed up data
Intel X25V 40GB - SRT for recent data drive. Might not be best, but just what I had to hand.
Mirror is initialising now… this might take a while. Then I need to plug in the 2nd SSD.
I don’t think I’ve ever pimped out a box this far before…
And to go off topic in my own thread, I don’t like the mobo I have and/or the i7-2600k for overclocking. The mobo jacks up the voltage for you unless you override it, which is fair enough actually as there doesn’t seem to be any stock voltage overclocking headroom on my sample. Runs as long as you like at 3.5 GHz 4 cores blazing at up to 1.25V-ish, but try the same at a tiny increase to 3.7 GHz and I get occasional BSODs. I only like stock voltage overclocking as I do use a performance/watt value call. Increasing the voltage really hits the power output quickly.
Rough indications on speed are, for prime finding, the i7-2600k with 4 physical cores at 3.5 GHz has the same throughput as the X6 1055T overclocked also to 3.5 GHz. I think system power consumption is lower too, but I haven’t done a side by side measurement yet. I suspect in other applications the i7 would be even faster since prime finding doesn’t benefit from HT.
I’ve given up on SRT already. During a reboot, the array was indicating showing offline. There was nothing I could find in the raid bios or windows software that would let me re-activate it. All I could do was select the option with dire warnings of data loss to clear and reset. Fortunately I hadn’t copied anything onto the disks yet, so not being able to find anything else to do, I had to select it. That simply split the mirror into two individual drives, so wouldn’t have given data loss anyway, but the software definitely needs to be more robust before I’d consider using it. I never had this problem the rare times when just a mirror would be potentially out of sync due to power cuts. It just rebuilt and away you go.
On the positive side, this is the 64 bit first box I built with a non-home version of Windows, so I can try the software mirror provided by the OS. Any comments on if that’s any good/bad?
what board are you using that’s giving such a low overclock at default volts?
DT.
Gigaybyte GA-Z68X-UD4-B3. I liked the previous Gigabyte mobos I got, but I’m not sure on this one, picked primarily as it happened to be available when ordering and I didn’t want to wait for others.
I have to admit the presence of turbo modes and all that on CPU, combined with the usual monitoring software not reading voltages off the board correctly, leaves me a bit in the dark as to exactly what’s going on at a given instant. The mobo bundled software is rather horrible. It makes manual overclocking unfriendly. You can use the traffic light easy overclocks, which take you up to 4.2 GHz at 1.38 volts from memory. And there is a separate power saver software that reconfigures the power delivery circuitry on the mobo that may or may not have an impact. What I hate most is the software can change settings on the mobo which override and are not displayed in the bios! You can’t reset it from that condition in the bios or using the clear cmos jumper! Actually, that might not strictly be the case, I can’t rule out some windows driver re-setting things on boot, but the effects lingered even after I uninstalled the software.
I’ve been wandering if an SRT cache would work on a mirrored array… no experience whatsoever in the area, I just thought it was an interesting question
It did. Just want it to have the option to recover nicely if it does fall over.
To add to my previous comments, I’m now wondering if I should just use the Intel 40GB SSD as a regular (program) storage drive, or some other files? Having just put steam on the 120GB system drive, I’m finding the free space drop rapidly. So if I could move some other stuff onto the 40GB drive that could help. I know it sucks at write speeds, but it is still nice on random read. Only question is what to store on it?
Elsewhere, I’ve still got an odd stability issue. Prime95/Linpack/memtest never show any error. With prolonged crunching running, windows can become unresponsive requiring a forced reboot to regain control. This happens even non-overclocked, doesn’t seem to have any pattern other than extended running under load. In my attempts to diagnose this, I’ve set the 1600 ram to down to 1333 and so far I haven’t had a repeat. I’m not counting my chickens yet and will need to observe this longer.
I’m still getting the crashing having backed off anything vaguely like overclocking settings… In a chance observation I saw a comment elsewhere the Vertex 3 and other OCZ SSDs were giving some users instability like I was seeing. I just read through this 18 page thread on their forums detailing observations on the erm… phenomenon. A firmware update was released on Friday which I installed Saturday but a moment ago I had another crash. The frequency I’m getting is about one in several days on average with 24/7 running. Rather annoying. Previously they never reproduced it, but now they say they have, and a new firmware is in progress.
While of course it is annoying for the flaw causing crashing to be present in the first place, it is nice to know they are aware of it, have reproduced it and are in the process of finding a fix for it. It doesn’t affect everyone, but it isn’t no one either. So if you’re thinking of getting a SSD, while the Vertex 3 is up there in the performance stakes, personally I’d be willing to trade that for stability. Maybe I should have gone Crucial m4 after all, but I’m not doing another reinstall at this stage!
For now all I can do is keep watching out for another firmware from them which hopefully resolves this.