ASUS P8Z77-V Premium motherboard - question on the mSATA

[Olternaut]

So the ASUS P8Z77-V Premium motherboard was recently announced and I was wondering about that onboard 32GB mSATA.

If you are going to run the OS off of an SSD then what could I use the mSATA for? Could I use it to speed up a regular hard drive like the momentus XT? And furthermore, if I did use the mSATA in conjunction with a momentus XT, would I get an increase in read speed above and beyond the momentus XT which already has a built in solid state cache?

How would I go about configuring all of this?

Thanks all.

[richardd43]

So the ASUS P8Z77-V Premium motherboard was recently announced and I was wondering about that onboard 32GB mSATA.

I have the board in question and am not sure what you are asking. Mine does not have onboard 32G mSATA

[Olternaut]

Um, you seem to have the deluxe version not the premium board I was asking about. Incidentally, does your deluxe version have a mSATA port at all?

Thanks.

[richardd43]

Incidentally, does your deluxe version have a mSATA port at all?

No, I had never heard of the port until you mentioned it.

Onboard mSATA Port with pre-installed 32GB SSD: This is something very interesting as the board has an mSATA port that is preinstalled with a 32GB SSD. Anyone who is looking for a easy caching implementation but does not want to buy an SSD can take advantage of this feature.

I did find this on the web but unless you are going to use standard spinner drives I am not sure what a person would use it for.

I would think it would be for storing data to boost start times and load web pages which an SSD OS drive does not need.

2 Raptors in RAID 0 might be a killer setup with the mSata drive.

[richardd43]

you seem to have the deluxe version not the premium board I was asking about

I understand that and yes the premium has the mSata port with 32G SSd installed. I looked it up to see what it actually was. Unless you are going to run a standard HDD I personally could not see spending the money on the option.

[Octavean]

Intel Thunderbolt would seems like more of a noteworthy feature of the Premium:


ASUS Launches First Intel Thunderbolt Certified Motherboard

However, I think I heard something about the ability to use more then one SSD for caching on this board. Not sure if that is the case but if true it would likely have to be via the ASUS proprietary SSD caching not Intel SRT.

With mSATA it looks like the Premium has 10 SATA options internally.

[richardd43]

Thunderbolt information is hard to find. I understand how the interface works but can't find any info on the hardware to hook to it.

Found this in wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Thunderbolt

[Octavean]

There are very few Thunderbolt products at the moment but this is likely due (in part or in whole) to the initial release of Thunderbolt on Apple hardware, which, is a limited (though growing) segment of the market.

You can find a lit of hardware here:

https://thunderbolttechnology.net/products

[joyofmvid]

Regarding the premium's mSATA 32GB SSD: this is a SATA 3Gb/s disk. I've been internet researching this for over a week so far. This is what I found so far:
. you can use the current board for:
1) Intel Smart Response as a cache for an existing HDD which contains you operating system (read mobo user guide for SSD partioning that will be required
2) Intel Rapid Start which provides a quick boot from sleep mode
3) Intel Smart Connect which perfor s updates while in sleep mode

. you can change the current board with a larger mSATA SSD (google MyDigital mSATA for fast SSDs. I am currently waiting for a reply from ASUS to find out whether I can install the MyDigital 256GB SATA 6Gb/s onboard SSD and if not, I will consider install either MyDigital 128GB SATA3Gb/s onboard SSD or use the standard Corsair Flash Voyager 256GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD. I will then put Windows 7 on this 128/256GB SSD.