Intel Smart Response technology and SSHD

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Bokka
Posts: 32
Joined: Mon Jan 09, 2017 2:40 am

Intel Smart Response technology and SSHD

Post by Bokka » Wed Mar 08, 2017 12:29 pm

Hello everyone!

I recently purchased a Seagate 2TB hard drives SSHD Firecuda.

Unfortunately, the chipset of my motherboard (H270) does not support the "Intel Smart Response Technology", which from what I understand is used to optimize disk performance even for SSHD.

But reading on the website of Seagate, I seem to have realized that in the new SSHD Seagate drives, a firmware was implemented which handles these optimizations automatically without the need for Intel Smart Response technology.

Did I get it right? Or without the ability to use this technology Intel my SSHD disk will have the same performance of a traditional disk?

Thanks so much!

mic
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Jun 08, 2017 3:12 pm

Re: Intel Smart Response technology and SSHD

Post by mic » Fri Jun 16, 2017 4:08 pm

I couldn't give you figures or even certainty, but in principle - Intel's SRT is basically a more manual way of doing what an SSHD does itself. It is taking a slow but cheap mechanical drive, and adding in a small amount of fast but expensive solid-state storage in front of it to cache the data going in and out. When writing, your OS can then simply dump data in when writing and get back to the job at hand, while that 'back end' storage system (be it SRT in the system chipset or the firmware in the SSHD itself) can handle pushing that across onto the spinning disk. Reading is similar - when the OS requests some data, the caching algorithm should hopefully already have it there in the fast SSD cache and be able to retrieve the data directly from that. If not, then it has to fall back to reading it off the spindle. It's the data usage patterns and the algorithm that determines how much that has to happen, in either case.

In short: They're two different ways of achieving the same outcome. You'd be unlikely to see any performance difference if you _could_ enable SRT on top of your SSHD, and you'd likely just be wasting money. Intel's new Optane stuff does appear to change things a little, though that's another subject. ;)

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