I recently picked up a Core i5 6600k and a Gigabyte Z170 Gaming 6 with 16GB of RAM. My storage system consists of one 60GB SSD, and two 1TB HDDs. After some research I decided to make use of Intel Smart Response over installing Windows 7 X64 SP1 directly to the SSD. The install went well, RAID was enabled, and Intel RST was set to enable Performance mode. Start-up time and general use of my computer is quite fast, as to be expected.
However, when I started transferring some files between my secondary hard drive and the hard drive linked to the RAID cache drive, my speeds are incredibly slow. For example I started transferring 36.3 GB of data. Now I have 15.5 GB of data left to transfer, and the speed is currently sitting at 11.7 MB/s. It's slowly declining. Also, I cannot open any programs or minimize or maximize any Windows, without waiting 5-10 minutes for the mouse click to register. I tried to open Intel RST while the transfer is ongoing, and it does not even open. Nor does Task Manager.
Is this normal for a cache drive RAID array?