Intel Z68 Express Chipset Preview: SSD Caching And Quick Sync

[Guest]

Does SSD caching allow one ssd to cache for my different raid arrays? or does it "pair" to only single drives? if this is for single drives, it's useless.

 

[shadowmaster625]

Useless. It makes no sense to cripple your SSD by more than 50% just for the small convenience of having to segregate your media files and maybe a few of your largest applications. If I have to install a game onto my media drive, then so be it. What I want to know is how much faster or slower would a game load/run if it were installed on a separate drive vs being SSD cached. I bet that all in all you are better off with a SSD boot drive. What we really need is to figure out a way to move all that WinSXS crap off the boot drive. And dont forget all the installers too. Windows 7 likes to keep a copy of every single installer you ever ran, sometimes multiple copies. Some of these installers are hundreds of MB. But if you delete them windows gets mad when you try to uninstall.

 

[ww2003]

Well thats is great I was wondering if they would do that... really to bad i Already ordered my P67 board... but then again my pc crashed and have to build a new one... the ssd doesn't do much for me and probably many others that do budget builds it wont matter to them.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]shadowmaster625[/nom]Useless.[/citation]You're arguing against the facts as laid out exceptionally by hardware god Chris Angelini. Good luck with that.

 

[illuminatuz]

cool..

 

[wjw2000]

This is SOOO not useless, Hey Toms hardware can you please run this test using an ACARD: ANS-9010 in both single and double SATA modes? I have a feeling the results are going to be in AWESOME!

 

[youssef 2010]

[citation][nom]masterofevil22[/nom]waiting for Bulldozer...[/citation]

You're not the only one.

BTW, thanks for the excellent article, toms.

 

[foscooter]

No mention of a release date. Q4? Exact date?

 

[Guest]

In terms of keeping the os nice and clean, check out some of the Citrix XenDesktop optimizations for Windows 7 delivered via provisioned images. Some good tips for reducing OS I/O use as well.

 

[papalion]

Excellent discussion of SSD caching! Yous mention though that "You can also only have one accelerated disk per system". Do you mean one physical disk or one virtual volume, i.e. a RAID 5 array formatted as a single drive?
Also "Intel’s Express Chipset SATA RAID controller hub has to be installed and enabled the platform controller hub needs to be in RAID mode". Would Intel SSD caching be compatible with the following setup:
I boot from an SSD connected to the Intel RAID controller; for my data volume, I use three SATA disks connected to a secondary Adaptec 5805 storage controller, configured in RAID 5; can I now partition say 18GB of my SSD to be used for Intel caching?
Adaptec's own solution "MAX CACHE" works well but costs over 1000! So i was wondering if the two would play nice together? (BTW, I'm not planning on running a server, just a high-end workstation)

 

[mread41]

The problem is, Intel doesn't aim their technology at power users. Intel aims their technology primarily at Businesses, power users are an afterthought (because businesses will drop more each than almost the entire power user market put together does on intel hardware every time they release newer/better tech). If I was a car salesman... I wouldn't bend over backwards to try and make sure I had lots of customers who won't make me much money happy if it (as in this case) means that I have to short the people who do make me money and want different kinds of cars because they have different purposes in mind generally.

 

[Guest]

This article completely fails to see one market for this chipset. home server. it needs a fast & cheap cpu e.g. i5-2500k @ 4.5ghz plus benfits from occasional use of the integrated display driver and transcoding engine... obviously a kvm enabled server board doesn't need a gpu+display but then they don't allow overclocking...

 

[Guest]

can we see a testing methodology? what were the system specs? what generation x25-v was used? for the SSD tests, was the OS on the SSD, or was the SSD attached as a secondary drive and then selected as the target for the PCMark tests?

 

[bishoplord]

That’s where Virtu comes into play. You add a discrete card, connect to the HD Graphics-enabled outputs on a Z68-based motherboard, and Lucidlogix’s software facilitates the best of Quick Sync and today’s fastest GPUs. It’s a marriage of P67 and H67, with simultaneous 3D and transcoding acceleration.

I wonder if I would still be able to use Nvidia 3D Vision if the only way to use both the Quick Sync feature and discrete card is by connecting to the Z68 MB? Time will tell I guess.

 

[mdadli]

Can someone explain to me in layman term what is the difference between P67 and Z68?This is all too confusing to me. Thank you very much in advance

 

[foscooter]

[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Yes, so long as all members of the array are hard disks.[/citation]

Can anyone confirm this. That I could use a iX25-V to cache my 2x1TB HDD RAID 0 array?

But only 1 cache, can't do my other RAID 0 array, too?

 

[Guest]

so can you use part of the SSD as a boot drive, and use the remainder of the SSD space as caching for a traditional HDD?