Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) & SSD Partitioning

[mikewellington]

Hi i am building a new PC and would like to get a few things straight.

Correct me if I am wrong but can you only use IRST with one SSD to enhance the performance of one HDD?

I am going to use the PC for music production and use a lot of sample libraries on my large 3TB HDDs - I would love to be able to increase the bandwidth of these drives to allow better performance at higher sample rates.

I would like to buy a large sata 3 SSD and partition it to use on 2 of my harddrives - is this possible? Given what I want to do I presume having large IRST SSD capacity would be the way to go to get the most out of my sample libraries?

Sorry this isn't worded the best but I'm still trying to get my head around it - also would I have to reformat my 3GB HDDs to RAID therefore requiring me to take everything off them and then put back on afterwards?

Thanks,

M.

 

[twelve25]

You can only accelerate one drive (or RAID set) with an SSD. I don't know about Z77, but on my Z68 board it seems to only allows one acceleration set, period.

Also, keep in mind SRT is just a caching device. So it will only accelerate what it can cache. For your music samples, it would cache the most frequently and recently used ones, so it could help if you had a smaller (under 64GB) set were being used on a specific project, but it isn't going to speed up a whole 3TB worth of randomly accessed files.

 

[mikewellington]

Okay thanks for that - I presumed that this would be the case using the most recent/frequently used samples so perhaps just using a smaller SSD would be the best option - that is unless I can partition a larger SSD to allow SRT on a smaller allocated section of the SSD and use the rest for normal SSD use ...? Could this be done or will SRT only work using the entire SSD drive?

I do have a Z77 mother board - Anyone know if Z77 can handle more than one SRT drive?

Also - would the best option be to create the RAID set before installing the operating system (Win7)

Thanks very much for your help with this.

M.