Question about rst and rst(E)

Important Drivers General: Storage Drivers (AHCI/RAID, NVMe and USB)
1

Having planned a dual installation of win 7 and win 8.1 on my z390, I opened the recommended AHCI driver post and it said that for
Intel 300-Series Chipsets (like Z370) we should use latest Intel RST v16/17 platform drivers;

So I downloaded RST(E)15.5.2.1054 for Win 7 cause v16/17 did not support win 7,
but when trying to use a v16 or 17 driver for win 8.1 I noticed they are RST but not RST(E).

1 - isn’t rst(E) better and more modern than rst(E) ? why newer versions are rst and not rst(E)?

2 - Then, Should I use a rst v16/17 for win 8.1 or a rst(E) one like 15.5.2.1054 ?


Thanks

2

@Sempa :

I try to explain:
The difference between Intel RST and RSTe/RST(e) drivers is the absence (RST) or the presence (RSTe) of an additional SCSI Filter driver named iaStorF.sys, whose task is to tell the OS, that the SATA connected disk drive is an SCSI disk (although it may not be one). This SCSI Filter driver will only be installed, if the OS is Windows 7.
It is the "garbage cleaning" of the SSD cells via TRIM/UNMAP command, which benefits from the presence of the SCSI Filter driver while running Win7, because Win7 doesn’t support the "UNMAP" command.
The first (oldest) Intel RST drivers up to v11.2.0.1006 didn’t contain any SCSI filter driver, because SSDs were not yet the "standard" system drives and the knowledge about the TRIM/UNMAP commands was very limited at that time. The newest v16/17 platform Intel AHCI/RAID drivers do not contain the iaStorF.sys file, because these modern drivers are designed for being used with modern Windows Operating Systems from Win8.1 up, which natively do support the UNMAP command and don’t need an SCSI Filter driver.

If you are running Win8.1 or Win10, you can use all Intel RST and RST(e) drivers. Only Win7 doesnt work with the latest Intel RST drivers, which belong to the v16 or v17 platform.

3

Thanks a lot for explanation , Fernando

4

Hi Fernando,

I don’t want to hijack this thread but I have a very similar question regarding RST and RSTe. I 'm still using a PC running on Windows Server 2008R2 with an ICH10 chipset. Currently installed is the latest RST v11.2.0.1006, but I have seen that RSTe v11.7.4.1001 also supports ICH10.

Does it make any sense upgrading to the RSTe driver if only the boot drive is sdd and the others are WD red HHDs?

5

@Unikat2000 :
Everything makes sense, if the result enhances our knowledge. Since I never owned a system with an Intel ICH10R Southbridge, I was not able to find it out myself.
So please test it and report here about the results you got. Don’t forget to mention the BIOS setting (IDE/AHCI/RAID) of your on-board Intel SATA Controller,

6

Since PC operates as NAS system I have to be careful with this, cause I don’t want any issues with the data. I will try them but not within the next days…