All the Answers to Intel’s Brand New Z68 Chipset – Part 2 (Feature)

Looking back at our last article, we’ll continue with discussing Intel’s SRT (Smart Response Technology) and this cool feature on the Z68 chipset uses an SSD to cache more frequently used data from an hard drive. One can expect up to a 4x increase in performance over the traditional HDD.

The process of setting up this new tech requires a few simple steps to get it up and running, as you need to ensure that both the SSD and hard drive are hooked up then you need to make sure that the Intel controller default of AHCI is set to RAID in UEFI. After that you can go about installing Windows 7 to your hard drive as normal, but you can’t enable SRT until all the drivers are installed. Finally it’s just a mater of hitting the Accelerate button in the RST driver (see below).

Onwards, simply select the drive you’d like to use as a cache and select the disk you want “accelerated” (would usually be C:\) then choose the mode of Enhanced or Maximized (see following image). First option Enhanced is probably your best bet in terms of being safer, and it offers better read speeds but write speeds remain the same as the HDD used. Second is Maximized and this is a form of caching since data is written to the SSD then synced to the hard drive. This mode should yield similar write speeds as what the SSD used is capable of.

At the end of the day, SRT is ideal for those who can’t afford large capacity SSDs but want that solid state performance. By leveraging this tech, individuals can get smaller SSDs and be able to achieve similar speeds when used in conjunction with a traditional hard drive.