What's mSATA used for?

This seems to be similar to the talk of the day. :-p

So one of the features on my motherboard is an mSATA connector that allows me to put in an SSD that the system can use for "Intel® Smart Response and Intel® Rapid Start". I understand the latter is for quick booting, but is this all it's really for, shaving (dozens of) seconds off the boot time? I'm not using RAID and while 45-60 seconds to boot up can sometimes get annoying, it takes enough of that just to get the TV (my monitor atm) setup to the right input. If I'm not fast enough with the TV, then my desktop looks like someone dropped a bomb on it because of how windows handles things.

Is there something Else that I haven't mentioned that these are used for? Perhaps a swap drive or maybe a temporary/cache drive for my applications? Maybe this isn't even something I'm going to use. If it Is something I would use, then is 60Gb big enough (my boot SSD is 240Gb) for my needs?

You can use it for whatever you like champ. Treat just like any other sata port. Pretty sure its only sata II though.

BTW why is it taking 45=60 seconds for you to get into windows with your ssd? Thats way too long. I'd be doing a clean install to tidy everything up.

I think you must have to do a fresh install on your ssd to shorten the time it boots up. Im on a hdd and i boot up in 30 seconds.

Yep, something is wrong with your system. It takes me less than 30 seconds to boot into windows 7 and I'm running an old 5400 rpm HDD.

Windows 7 takes like 30-40 seconds to boot for me on a Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm. My friends WD Caviar Black 1TB boots Win8 in like 12 seconds :(

Windows 8 boots super fast if you change a few settings in the bios.

You can get it down to less than 5 seconds with an ssd.

Planning on it, but it's on the back burner and bootup times aren't a big priority. :-p

Note: I'm talking cold boots.

Also, yes it is SATA2 so half the thoroughput of SATA3, but is it more like RAM or an actual SSD (IE: non-volitile storage)? The manual warns that it will disable a port on the SATA2 bus so I guess the decision is more of physical space within the case (a non-issue) or heat generation. Eh, either way it's way on the back end of things as my primary SSD is big/fast enough to handle things if configured properly.