Intel Rapid Storage Technology

[coercitiv]

Hopefully not too OT a question and quickly answered - what's the latest IRST driver that works on Win7? I've tried to use the latest driver on a few hardware platforms running Win7 and it always tells me that the platform is not supported.

Did you try to run the setup program or just manually install the driver?

I had no problem manually updating the driver in Win 10, but I can't even start the setup 🙂

 

[Fernando 1]

Hopefully not too OT a question and quickly answered - what's the latest IRST driver that works on Win7? I've tried to use the latest driver on a few hardware platforms running Win7 and it always tells me that the platform is not supported.

All Intel RST drivers are working with any OS from Win7 up, but may not work with all Intel chipsets, if the Intel SATA Controller has been set to "AHCI".
For details please look into the start post of >this< thread.

 

[Hulk]

I did some testing of the Intel Rapid store a few years ago and found insignificant differences in my opinion from the MS drivers. The bloat of that package wasn't worth it for me. I like the lean MS install.

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[mikeymikec]

Did you try to run the setup program or just manually install the driver?

Because when it comes to storage, especially on customers' computers, I prefer not to screw around and so would base my logic of "will it work properly on this computer" to "if Intel say the platform isn't supported, then it's probably not a good idea".

All Intel RST drivers are working with any OS from Win7 up, but may not work with all Intel chipsets, if the Intel SATA Controller has been set to "AHCI".
For details please look into the start post of >this< thread.

It seems that in the last year or so, the installer went from "it'll install on pretty much any Intel chipset on Win7 as long as the chipset isn't really ancient" to the current situation, where I think the last time I saw an up-to-date IRST installer work on Win7 was when I was using the Asus Gryphon Z87 board.

The Intel Chipset Update utility doesn't seem to be anywhere near as picky.

 

[Fernando 1]

I did some testing of the Intel Rapid store a few years ago and found insignificant differences in my opinion from the MS drivers. The bloat of that package wasn't worth it for me.

That is why I do not recommend to install the Intel RST Software for AHCI systems.

It seems that in the last year or so, the installer went from "it'll install on pretty much any Intel chipset on Win7 as long as the chipset isn't really ancient" to the current situation, where I think the last time I saw an up-to-date IRST installer work on Win7 was when I was using the Asus Gryphon Z87 board.

The latest Intel RST drivers, which natively do support Intel 8- and 9-Series Chipsets, are the v13.6.3.1001 WHQL and v14.0.0.1095. The latest Intel RST drivers, which natively do support 5- and 6-Series Chipsets, are the v12.9.4.1000 WHQL ones. Users with an Intel 7-Series Chipset AHCI system, can use the RST drivers v13.1.0.1058 WHQL.

The Intel Chipset Update utility doesn't seem to be anywhere near as picky.

The "Intel(R) Chipset Device Software" (misleadingly often named Intel Chipset "Drivers") do not contain any driver and have nothing to do with the management of the Intel SATA Controllers (they only may give the Controller an Intel name).

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, I've verbosely recounted my flirtation with the Intel DRIVERS this time around.

For the Z68 chipsets and Win 7-64, the Intel RST bare drivers 12.9.4.1000 install without a hitch.

So to make a rhyme, the need to add HotSwap! freeware to my system is the only real b****. And I'd done that before -- really -- without a problem.

The behavior of Primo-caching's "L2" feature without using its touted RAM-caching aspect is the same with either MS or Intel drivers. Nor is that a particular "drawback" of Primo, except that you can't see the "benchmarks" for the L2 feature without using the "L1" feature and main-attraction.

So in that regard, there's no substantial reason NOT to use the Intel drivers, except for the need to install another software feature on your own that allows for swapping out disks without using the Intel bloat-ware.

And the changeover and change-back within Device Manager should be easy and effortless, except for the necessary reboots to complete those changes.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Here's a footnote about 4K tests as it might pertain to the choice of drivers with a possible caching strategy.

With the MSAHCI driver and RAM caching, the 4K test result is around 55 MB/s, which -- I understand -- is pretty good. So it depends: if you believe in caching strategies, the choice of the driver can be a wash. Of course, a better-performing driver like the Intel AHCI would only show better results for the caching solution. I couldn't say at this time if it scales linearly. If I find out -- I'll post it here.