I’ve asked this question on three other forums, but no-one has been able to help me so far. I have a Windows 8 system that has four disks: (1) Samsung 840 Pro (system drive, C:), (2) 2TB SATA III Seagate (secondary drive, D:), (3) 2TB SATA II Western Digital (Backup Drive, Z:), and (4) a 64GB Crucial m4 mSATA (not yet partitioned). All drives are running on the same SATA controller, and I have RAID enabled in BIOS. The motherboard is a Gigabyte Z77-DS3H.
I want to use the m4 to accelerate the Seagate 2TB drive. I have Intel RST 12.5.0.1066 installed. When I click on the “Performance” tab and then click “Enable acceleration”, the Crucial M4 is automatically selected as the solid-state drive I want to use. But below, where I am to “Select the disk or volume to accelerate”, only one disk is listed - the backup 2TB drive (see image below). My D: drive is not listed. On previous versions of Intel RST, the drive would be listed, but when I tried to select it I would get an unknown error.
I have already tried switching the SATA cables around, in case there was a problem with that port, but that didn’t fix the problem.
So, my question is: What could be causing Intel RST to not recognise the drive?
@ markbarnes:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!
Now to your question:
I doubt, that the Intel RST software doesn’t recognize your Seagate HDD. It obviously does not offer this HDD as "Disk or Volume to accelerate" and we have to find out why.
Although I am not sure about it, these are my thoughts:
- The Intel(R) Smart Response Technology (ISRT) has been developed to push the performance of a big sized HDD containing the OS by using a small sized SSD as data cache for the HDD. This technology has never been designed for a system with 2 HDDs and 2 SSDs, where the OS is on an SSD and the other SSD shall be used as data cache for any of the non-system drives.
- As you can read >here<, the Smart Response Technology creates something like a RAID0 array with the HDD and SSD as members. Maybe this only works, if both members are connected with SATA ports in the neighbourhood (port0+1 or port2+3), but you are trying to create this SSD Caching between a HHD, which is connected with port1 and an SSD, which hangs on port3 or port4. This may not work.
By the way: It was not a good decision to install the RST drivers v12.5.0.1066, because they definitively do not support TRIM in RAID0 and maybe not even outside the RAID, if the SATA Controller has been set to "RAID" mode.
Regards
Fernando
Thanks, for your reply, Fernando.
As I mentioned earlier, I can cache my drive Z:, but not my drive D:, so it doesn’t it SHOULD work, even though my system drive is an SSD. I’ve also tried switching over the two drives onto different SATA ports, but no matter which ports are connected, it’s always drive Z: that will work, and drive D: that will not.
What RST drivers do you recommend? 12.7, or one of the earlier ones?
It depends a little bit on the Intel RAID ROM version, which is within the BIOS of your mainboard. If you want to get full benefit of the newest Intel RST(e) drivers v12.7.0.1036, you should update the Intel RAID ROM resp. the EFI SataDriver module to v12.7.0.1936.
My favorite Intel RAID drivers are listed within >this< thread.