Although those of us in this world tend to spend a lot of money on components, hardware and peripherals in general, most users go with just enough and try to optimize their equipment as much as possible. As a general rule, the average user has a fast but small capacity SSD and at the same time a slow but large capacity HDD. For this reason and knowing that this configuration is the standard among users, Intel created Smart Response , a solution to have the best of both worlds.
Why limit ourselves to having only one of the improvements if we have both on our PC on different devices? A question that Intel engineers solved with this technology, which is part of the so-called Intel RST and is really useful.
Intel Smart Response, get the most out of your PC
According to Intel itself, this technology tries to unite both disks logically in a kind of double disk that, in fact, does not have to be SSD + HDD, but it can also include an SSHD, that is, a disk of hybrid solid state.
How it works is really interesting, since once we have installed the corresponding Intel RST driver on our motherboard with Intel chipset, we will have to enable the acceleration of the disk so that Smart Response begins to do its “magic”. As a quick explanation, we could say that this technology automatically recognizes and stores the most used software and data on our SSD, but offers as capacity what we have on the HDD.
In other words, we get the performance of the SSD in the size of the HDD, so we will only have advantages, without any counter-performance, since Smart Response caches data input and output modules on the SSD. We will have its performance by said acceleration, since the most used or valuable data such as system startup, programs or users will be taken to said SSD.
The lowest value data is not saved
The rest of the data of little importance or heavy weight ends up in the HDD, so the performance for both disks is always prioritized, since the accesses to the traditional hard disk will be made to a much lesser extent.
Keep in mind that here everything revolves around the cache, so it is available on the SSD, since these data are the most valuable to minimize access, input and output times as well as the overall latency of the interfaces. This Smart Response technology only has two small limitations that today are practically non-existent: you need an SSD of at least 16 GB of capacity or an SSHD of at least a minimum flash capacity of 8 GB.
With the volumes that we handle today and the devices that are for sale, it is really complicated that we find any limitation, but if by chance you keep an SSD or SSHD of said sizes or less, the ideal would be to make the small jump to the minimum capacity that you can find today on the market, which will surely be 32 GB.
