Depending on your hardware, there are two ways to add an Intel 335 SSD to a PC, depending on the age and features offered by your motherboard. Anyone not on the latest generation of Intel hardware will only have one option, which is to boot from the 335 SSD. Users with an Intel board equipped with Intel’s SRT technology have the option of using the SSD as a companion to a mechanical drive in the form of a cache.
Loading Windows 8 and applications directly on the 335 SSD as a boot device will yield the best performance over any caching solution. The caveat, of course, is space. SSDs are not currently as spacious as mechanical disks, so some may struggle to squeeze every application they have into the smaller sized models.
Intel’s Smart Response Technology takes a different approach to SSD management. Rather than the user deciding what lives on the SSD, all data lives on a hard drive. SRT simply caches the most frequently accessed files on the SSD. On the plus side, this lets the user forget about things like space constraints. On the negative side, the max cache size is limited to 64GB, and performance can be a mixed bag depending on what the user is doing.
Channelpro advice: go for the larger 180GB or 240GB model and use the SSD as a bootable drive.
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