I’ve been using SRT successfully for a number of years and have seen benefit from it caching a 1TB Seagate barracuda drive with a 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD. However, after the recent Windows 10 creators update, it seems that the SRT isn’t actually kicking in despite the UI and OROM showing that acceleration is configured successfully.
I have an ASRock Extreme 4 (Gen1) Motherboard, which is a Z68 chipset. I’m using 12.9.4.1000 RST(e) drivers in Windows and have an Intel 10.8.x OROM and latest BIOS. Everything is set up properly, I have the 1TB drive accelerated in Maximized mode and the IaStore UI shows that everything is good to go, but crystalmark/hdtune file benchmarks with all zero file and multiple passes shows no benefit for sequential or 4K read. I’ve tested with the acceleration turned off and get the exact same speeds. I mainly use the large drive to store games and use the acceleration to speed up the loading times/etc. This definitely used to work, but now I have objectively measured the app loading time on reboot (so it’s not cached in RAM) and it clearly isn’t using the SSD cache even though I have launched the same app many times. The loading times are noticeably slower than before when the cache was working (about double).
I store my OS and critical programs on a separate OCZ drive (identical to the one I use for my cache drive) and all benchmarks for that drive show great speeds with no issues. I have attached several screenshots showing this.
SRT Info:
Accelerated drive benchmark (have run this multiple times):
System Drive using the exact same type of SSD that is used for my cache (OCZ Vertex 2):
Drive Info (Cache disk, accelerated disk, system boot drive):
Just wanted to check if anyone else with a Z68 has actually noticed SRT kicking in on Windows 10 (specifically with creators update)? Maybe I’m missing something simple here or am I just SoL and should just go buy a big SSD/migrate my data over since this doesn’t work anymore?
I know the OROM is an older version, but I don’t believe it should matter since I’m not booting off the accelerated drive and none of my disks are > 2TB.
Your benchmark results are indeed bad. I wonder why you are using the Smart Response Technology, which has been designed by Intel for the acceleration of a speed of a HDD (= system drive) by using a small sized (16-32 GB) SSD, although you have 2 SSDs and are using one of them as system drive. You will get much better results, if you combine both 60 GB sized SSDs to a RAID0 array and use this 120 GB sized RAID0 as bootable system drive (= drive C:). Additionally I recommend to update the Intel RAID ROM module of your mainboard BIOS to a version, which is better matching your in-use Intel RAID driver.
If you should not want to give up your current system drive configuration and the Smart Response Technology, I recommend to try the following: 1. Uninstall the Intel RST Software v12.9.4.1000 from within the Control Panel’s “Add/Remove Software” section. 2. Reboot. 3. Install the Intel RST(e) Drivers & Software Set v13.2.8.1002 WHQL. 4. Reboot. 5. Reconfigure your previously used Smart Response Technology system. 6. Optimize the performance of your Intel RAID system according the start post of >this< thread. 7. Redo a benchmark test.
Thank you for the reply! Of course, using the two in raid0 would have been faster, but at the time (about 6 years ago) when I was building the system I wanted something where I could play a lot of different games and not have to worry about manually creating symlinks or installing certain games on the raid array due to space constraints. At that time larger SSD’s were also much more expensive.
Intel RST seemed like a good solution since I could store my steam library (~400GB+) on the 1TB drive and RST would take care of automatically using one of the SSD’s to cache my most played games and I would get SSD performance for loading levels/etc without any manual intervention/moving games around or making symlinks. Basically, set it and forget it.
Initially when I was on Windows 7, it worked just fine and did exactly that. However seems that ever since I upgraded to Windows 10 it just stopped working despite UI saying everything is good.
I tried the 13.2.8.1002 driver, but it still doesn’t seem to be working. I removed/re-created the accel config and everything, but no dice. Again not sure if this is a problem for me specifically or just that SRT with the z68 chipset doesn’t work anymore on Win10 (was hoping someone else that still has this old chipset may comment and you could add it to your notes).
At this point large SSD’s are so much cheaper that I just went ahead and ordered an 500G 850 EVO and will just use that for my boot and main storage and RAID0 my two old OCZ vertex2 drives ( which will still be slower than the EVO by itself ) for some additional storage.
