Dear Forum,
First of all, since I am new here, I ask you to please excuse me if this thread is in the wrong area of this Forum, or if this subject has been discussed elsewhere.
I did many searches in here and learened a lot but still did not find anything related to my situation.
My company recently assigned me an Asus S46CM Laptop. According to Asus’ website this machine is a 3rd gen Core i7, 8GB DDR3, 24GB SSD and 750GB HDD with iSRT technology. The chipset is Intel HM76.
It came with Windows 8 preinstalled. Since I use Linux natively and run only a copy of Windows XP inside VirtualBox, I removed the S46CM’s original 750GB HDD, and kept it in storage, and slapped my old laptop’s 500GB HDD with my current Linux install in the S46CM.
It booted normally straightaway, in BIOS compatibility mode.
I have since converted my 500GB HDD to GPT and got the machine to boot on EFI mode.
Now, as far as I have read, iSRT (SSD caching) in this laptop can only be set up using Intel’s Windows-only RAID management software. Since there are no iSRT drivers, nor RAID management software for Linux, I am wondering whether modding the BIOS to include Intel’s RST OROM would allow me to configure iSRT at the OROM level prior to boot, so that SSD caching would work seamlessly in Linux. I came across this idea after reading in Intel’s support KB that Linux’s own RAID management is compatible with Intel RST. Would this be possible – to set up iSRT at OROM level and benefit from the disk caching feature while using Linux?
Myabe the idea is a bit far-fetched but this forum seemed to be the way to go. Thanks in advance.
@ agent008:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!
AFAIK the Intel(R) Smart Response Technology is not compatible with Linux (for details you may look >here<).
Furthermore it is impossible to "set the IRST at OROM level", because the IRST is a software technology and not a hardware one.
So you probably have to decide either to install an actual Windows OS being able to benefit from the IRST or to stick with Linux without being able to use the SSD Caching.
Another option may be to replace the SSD of your system by a bigger sized one and to install the OS onto it. Then you can use the HDD for the data storage.
Regards
Fernando
Hello Fernando
Thanks for the quick reply.
From what I understood of the iSRT, there would be at least part of its magic done in hardware because the chipset has to support it. Maybe the driver contains some microcode which is uploaded to the chipset and the task is done partially in hardware, partially in software… I don’t know, it seems the internal workings of iSRT are quite obscure so far. Until someone digs up more information about it or Intel decides to not lock in their tech to a Windows-only world, I will pursue another solution.
Well, Getting a larger SSD as you suggested is out of budget right now, and although my Linux system partition could be made to fit the SSD, it seems that software such as bcache or flashback would be smarter than this by keeping track of which files are most accessed and then I could benefit from a speedup for a wider range of files.
I know this isn’t quite the right forum but if anyone is interested I can post later on regarding my success (or failure) going down this route.
Cheers
A final report within this thread about what you decided to do and how you have solved your problem would be much appreciated.
Good luck!
Fernando