14 DAY TRIAL // Since Intel, a while ago, got into the solid state drive business, it makes sense that it would do all it can to promote them, and it looks like its most recent move is one that does this while providing users with another benefit.
Not long ago, Intel revealed that it had experienced its most lucrative financial quarter yet (again) and it stands to reason that the Santa Clara, California-based company would want to continue making profits.
Seeing as how the CPU market accounted (predictably) for almost all revenues, Intel might decide to become a bit more active where solid state drives are concerned.
In fact, a report made not long ago states that the outfit's next move will consist of an SSD-reliant technology capable of boosting system performance.
The technology in question is dubbed SRT (Smart Response Technology) and its purpose is to determine which files are used most frequently and store them on any SSD.
The feature needs at least one hard disk drive and a solid state drive to function and could be seen as an SSD caching solution.
To this end, the company also plans to deliver the so-called Larsen Creek, a solid state drive with a capacity of 20 GB.
This unit was developed specifically for this SRT and will be cheap, since its capacity is rather small in itself.
Of course, as already implied, any SSD can work with the Smart Response Technology, although it looks like 60GB is the maximum supported capacity.
The folks behind the report go on to saying that SRT was tested on a Western Digital HDD of 1 TB as well as the Larsen Creek. Performance recorded in PCMark 05 was 355.5% better than when just the HDD was used.
In other words, boot times were 19.4% better and any application startup, file copying or saving, etc., should be accomplished much more readily. May 11 is when the release should be made, alongside the Z68 Express chipset.