A word about intel Smart Response Technology

As you know, the new PC is based on the SandyBridge Z68 which can benefit from intel's Smart Response Technology (SRT).

SRT lets you use an SSD drive (up to 64gb) to boost the speed of a platter drive significantly. Essentially, intel's SATA controller uses the SSD as a cache for the HDD, and hence most frequently accessed files are sped up significantly.

A common misconception about SRT is that you can only use to to boost your boot drive, ie you have to install Windows on an HDD to benefit. THAT IS FALSE. You can have windows installed on another SSD and use a separate SSD to boost an HDD of your choice.

As an example, my system has an OCX Vertex LE as the Windows drive, and an intel 311 SSD to boost a 1TB SpinPoint that has my games installed on it.

SRT offers two modes: "maximised" and "enhanced". Think of it as RAID 0 and RAID 10. Maximised (RAID 0) offers faster reads AND writes, but comes at the risk of losing data. If you set up a maximised SRT boost, the controller will sync the SSD with the HDD at set intervals. If anything happens between a write to the SSD and then (for example you crash) then you lose that data.

"enhanced" mode is more secure. Data is read from the SSD and written back to the HDD in real time. This means that, compared to maximised mode, write times are much slower. Read times are the same.

Initially I had SRT set up as "maximised", mainly because that was what all the reviews had used. Due to system instability recently (as you've read :P) I crashed quite a bit, and funnily enough lost quite a bit of data! I had downloaded ChopLifter HD from steam for example, only to find that the game had disappeared and was found much later on in an archaic "FOUND000.CHK" folder. Similarly, Steam had lost some files causing it to refuse to log in.

I've now set it up as "enhanced", and as I'm boosting a games drive, ie I don't need fast writes but fast reads, then things have been fine since then. If you crash, you don't have that extra risk of losing uncached data.

I guess if you want to use SRT to boost a drive that you use for massive writes (example video/audio/photo editing) then maximised mode makes the biggest difference, but with the risks above.

If, like me, you want to speed up your gaming system, then make sure you set SRT to "enhanced". The last thing you'd want is to lose gamesaves, or your rank in Battlefield 3 :D

Finally, it's worth mentioning that you can defrag an SRT-boosted volume. As you know, SSDs shouldn't be defragged but with SRT, defrag entirely ignores the SSD thankfully.