
Owing to the relatively high cost of solid-state drives, PC users commonly pair a midsize (60GB to 120GB) SSD with a larger hard-disk drive, dedicating the SSD to handling the operating system and frequently used applications and data, while using the HDD for bulk storage.

Smaller SSDs will work fine though (we tested with a 20GB model), and the extra space on SSDs larger than 64GB can still be accessed by the system.Ī hybrid HDD/SSD caching setup has some usability benefits. Intel Smart Response Technology can be configured to consume up to 64GB of space on an SSD. A modern SATA III SSD, for example, can deliver reads and writes in the vicinity of 550 mbps, with sub-1-millisecond access times by way of comparison, a 10,000-rpm hard drive may hover at around 160 mbps under ideal conditions, with multi-millisecond access times. Solid-state drives typically offer near-instantaneous access times as well as transfer speeds that far exceed even the fastest hard-disk drives’ performance. Smart Response Technology is a transparent caching arrangement that intelligently monitors both data reads from and data writes to a standard hard drive, caching the most frequently accessed bits of data to a faster solid-state cache to yield SSD-like performance in a system that uses a standard hard drive for its main storage volume.
Do i need intel smart connect technology drivers#
The technology is fully implemented in Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology (RST) drivers and software (version 10.5 or newer), but it’s enabled only on the Z68 Express and on newer 6- and 7-Series Intel chipsets.

SRT is not a feature specific to the Z68 Express chipset hardware, however.

When Intel launched the Z68 Express chipset for second-generation Core family processors, one of the chipset’s differentiating features was its support for Smart Response Technology (SRT), a solid-state caching technology designed to enhance overall system performance and responsiveness.
