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My hard drive took a dive so I looking at getting some new drives.

I was thinking of getting 3 WD Black Edition 1TB disks.

My motherboard has the Intel Matrix Storage feature and I was going to hook everything up in RAID 5.

I am also pretty sure my motherboard support Intel Smart Response. So I would be able to use a small SSD drive to cache frequently used data. While I was at the electronics store (MicroCenter) they were telling me that the Smart Response only becomes active on the first disk because you have to select the disk you want to cache.

Assuming that they know what they were talking about, would I be able to configure smart response to cache data from my Matrix Storage RAID 5 configuration instead of caching from a single disk?

All little info for everyone.

My build:

Gigabyte X79 based motherboard (exact model escapes me at the moment) Intel i7 3820 Processor 32GB of DDR3 RAM

I don't see how the GPU is relevent...

Any assistance would be a great help as I want to get the stuff tonight.

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2 Answers 2

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If your mobo supports intel Matrix Raid, go for the RAID 10. it's the best of both worlds. It's raid 1+0. a mirrored stripe. MY buddy did that for his build, that systems screamed. Besides I'm sure the general concensus is that RAID 10 beats raid 5 any day of the week, especially on hybrid raid like the intel matrix setups.

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  • I would go this way but I was only originally going to buy 3 drives. Maybe I can swing a 4th.
    – AtomicPorkchop
    Commented Dec 18, 2013 at 17:42
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    if you're buying three drives, might as well and spend the extra 25% and get the RAID 10, its worth the money, not just in performance, but reliability, you could in theory lose both the mirrors and still be in business.
    – MDT Guy
    Commented Dec 18, 2013 at 18:19
  • Yeah the more I think about it I think I will go ahead and do that.
    – AtomicPorkchop
    Commented Dec 18, 2013 at 20:33
  • just double check the chipset does raid 10, I know most do now, but in the beginning intel raid only did 1,0 and 5.
    – MDT Guy
    Commented Dec 18, 2013 at 20:37
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That is correct, you can cache 1 "disk" with up to 64Gig of the SSD unit, and only when in the RAID mode for the intel chipset SATA controller. and it is capable of caching a raid volume (intel assembled type).

Support for smart responce started back at the Z68 chipset, caching is done at a lower level than a file cache. A sort of DIY hybrid drive.

If you plan on setting it up or even buying towards using it, you could probably read most of the info before buying.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/smart-response-technology.html
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/technology-briefs/smart-response-technology-brief.pdf

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