Intel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT) is designed to bridge that gap between SSDs and mechanical hard drives. A middle ground if you will where no other option really exists. It achieves this by combining the two technologies together, although SSD’s are quite expensive on the cost per Gigabyte, the low capacity parts are relatively cheap and can achieve around the same performance of the large parts. Intel’s SRT will allow you to combine that lower capacity SSD with a mechanical drive to help boost it’s performance in your system using the SSD as a cache.

Until now there really hasn’t been a middle ground between the two. You have had products come along like the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid which boosted read speeds using a 4GB read cache but, in most benchmarks, these can be easily beaten by a single Western Digital Velociraptor.

SSD caching isn’t exactly a new idea in the IT world as it’s been around for a few years in various forms like Intel Turbo Memory Technology (Robson Technology), which was launched way back in 2006. However it never gained any real momentum until now with the launch of the Z68 chipset motherboards which support I/O caching in the form of SRT.

Smart Response Technology improves the responsiveness of a system by storing the files or parts of files that you access the most frequently onto the SSD. The SRT software however can only cache a certain amount of data due to the limited amount of space on the SSD you will be using, which will certainly not be anywhere as big as your current HD setup, unless you are crazy and have a lot of cash on hand. So what SRT will do is identify the most beneficial files to be moved over to the cache area, and will also be able to see those audio and video files you are only using once in a blue moon and not move those.

As a result the software will learn your behavior in using your machine and modify the behavior of your setup so that you have better performance. However with that being said the performance gain will not be immediate like it would be with a straight SSD solution. Over time your machine will speed up as it catches up to what you are doing and modifies it’s behavior to match your own. Your system will also only display this setup as a single drive despite you have both an SSD and and HD in your system, for obvious reasons.

To use SRT there is only three things that you will need, a motherboard that supports SRT (Z68), an SSD, and a mechanical disk. The hard disk and the SSD can be of any size and speed, but it’s worth bearing in mind that SRT can only use up to 64GB of space on the SSD, so it isn’t worth purchasing a larger sized one