I am investigating building of a new computer. Will be a dual boot of opensuse and windows 7. Looking at asus p8z68 mb. The z68 provides capability for SSD Smart Response Tech that is essentially use of a SSD as a cache for speed up. I have a number of questions.
Will this feature work on linux and opensuse in particular?
Does this feature work on a dual boot system?
If it works would I format some of the SSD in windows file system format and some in linux file system format and define partitions accordingly?
Will opensuse installer know how to do the formatting of the auxiliary SSD?
How can the system be configured to know which programs to cache on which blocks of the SDD or does the chipset logic know how to do that?
Actually I have no experience with SRT but I suppose that it’s almost completely implemented in SW similar to SATA “RAID”. The cheap integrated “RAIDs” have (almost) nothing in common with real HW RAID controllers.
ad 1) I guess it won’t work
2) In dual boot system it could be used only by Windows
3) I have no idea how it works in Windows, but theoretically you could create two partitions on SSD - one for SRT in Windows and one for Linux (the root partition for system), but I don’t know if SRT can use only part of SSD of it can use only whole SSD
4) the installer won’t do anything special, but you could use part of the SSD for system (see 3) )
5) I guess SRT simply stores the most used block to both SSD and HDD and reads them from SSD, kind of SW RAID1
(Again, this is my guess, I don’t have any real SRT experience, but I see the similarity with SW RAID…)
No, its worse.
Its dangerous:
some Linux systems (don’t know which exactly) do not recognize the pseudo-RAID
that is set up for Smart Response Technology.
Writes to the SSD can then very quickly destroy (or make unreadable) all data !
Seems that under windows it works through Intels RAID driver lastor.sys.