ExpressCache & Hibernation Partition

Hey everyone,

This is my first post on these forums. I just picked up an Asus UX32A ultrabook a couple days ago and am just going through the motions with it after installing a fresh copy of Windows 7.

I used this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo/705681-howto-configure-large-32gb-ssd-work-expresscache.html guide to get ExpressCache working on my 500GB/24GB hybrid HDD. It seemed to work just fine as shown my CMD using eccmd -info. I then installed a 6GB Hibernation partition for hibernation mode on my 24gb ssd partition. The guy who wrote the guide said it can come out of hibernation in approximately 5 seconds



What I observed:

From Shutdown to Desktop (including login screen) it takes 39 seconds.

From Hibernation to Desktop (including login screen) it takes 22 seconds


Is this what I would normally expect without creating a hibernation partition? Or is this the best I'm going to get?

Do I have to download Intel Rapid Start Technology in conjunction with the partition?

 

Usually with hybrid drives, the 24GB "SSD" is not visible to the user, it is just a cache used by the drive controller to manage your data. Does Windows "see" a 24GB drive and a 500GB drive? Or are there two separate drives, a 24GB "cache" drive and a 500GB HDD? What drive is this?

 

Windows normally uses a hibernation file located in the root directory of the boot drive where it can be found by the boot loader.

Intel Rapid Start Technology uses a separate hibernation partition. My knowledge of IRST relates to its use on Samsung notebooks and is in this thread. I presume that Asus have a utility to configure IRST to use a hibernation partition on the SSD. While the Windows hibernation file is a compressed file written when the computer hibernates, IRST uses an uncompressed file that is a mapped copy of the RAM contents and is updated in the background. The hibernation partition needs to be about 10% larger than the RAM. This should be configured by the IRST installer.

John

 

Here is what my Disk Manager looks like. The Disk 1 is what I thought was the 24GB SSD. This is after I made a 6GB Hibernation Partition.




Here it is running Command Prompt.

 

The model configuration file for my Samsung NP900X4C contains this:

It looks like it will support using a hibernation partition on other than the boot drive.

You need to find the Asus installer.

John

 

I'm not quite sure what I am looking for. The Asus installer for what?

 

Intel Rapid Start Technology. This assumes that Asus designed the notebook for use with IRST and it has an IRST-compatible BIOS.

At the moment it appears that hibernation is using the standard Windows hiberfil.sys file on the HDD. You can confirm this by checking if that file exists on the root of the C drive and also its date.

John