How can I use SRT to cache a non boot hard drive?

Question

In a comment on my answer to the question Making SSD & HDD work together like a hybrid I was informed that my statement that SRT can only cache a Windows boot drive is no longer valid.

I have several SSDs in my system and several hard drives too. I boot from one of the SSDs and would really like to use some of the spare space on one of my other SSDs to cache the hard drives (or at least one of the hard drives).

I know that this wasn't possible at the time I wrote my answer to that question (you could only SRT cache the boot drive), but is it still true? A quick search didn't find anything useful, most articles appear to refer to the version of SRT released at the time of the Z68 chipset.

If it is possible to cache an arbitrary hard drive, what are the requirements? Do you just need to update SRT, or does this functionality need a more recent chipset or ICH? Is it possible to set up multiple cache sets (presumably one cache partition per real partition or drive cached). Could you cache several hard drives using several partitions on a single SSD (so give each of 4 HDs a 64GB partition on a single 256GB SSD etc.)?

Answer 1

You need to:

• Install latest IRST from intel.com
• Have an SSD drive that is completely empty (no partitions)
• Have a RAID0 array, RAID1 array, RAID0+1 array, or a single non-SSD disk that you want to accelerate

Once you have all that, you should be able to launch IRST and configure "Acceleration" on your spare SSD. You can choose to only use a portion of your SSD if you want (SRT will only use up to 60 gigs, max). Any space "left over" will show as visible to the OS, after you setup SRT. You're free to make a partition at that point. It sounds like that's what you'll want to do. You should be able to choose any drive (not just boot) to accelerate.

You cannot have more than one volume accelerated at a time, unfortunately.