Intel Z68 Smart Response Technology

 

The Above Image Comes Courtesy of VR-Zone.

 

On April 25th, 2011, VR-Zone published an article titled Intel SSD Caching Feature for Z68 Chipset Explored. You can read that article here.

 

Intel SSD Caching is officially (or is that unofficially at this time) known as Intel Smart Response Technology. The feature is part of Intel's RST version 10.5, but is unique to the Z68 chipset. In a nutshell, Smart Response Technology allows for an SSD to act as a caching buffer between the motherboard and a traditional platter drive. In theory, this will be the marriage of SSD's ultra low access times and traditional platter drives high capacity points.

 

The theory is not a new concept. Adaptec already have an add-on product called MaxCache, LSI has CacheCade, SilverStone has HDDBOOST and there may be a few others I've left out. All of these products work with varying degrees of success, but the constant is that the data must be cached on the SSD for read performance to increase.

 

For the purpose of this article the important thing to know is that Intel's Smart Response Technology is limited to 64GB for the SSD.

 

For more information on Intel Smart Response Technology, I'm going to once again direct you back to the VR-Zone article where you will find all of the System Requirements and Feature Limitations.