New IRST Driver v13.0.0.1098

[G73S]

I just noticed on the ASUS laptop driver page they had a new IRST Driver, which is also posted on Station Drivers

RST 13.0 release enables support for

Intel® 9 series chipset (Haswell refresh desktop platform).
Haswell H Mobile Refresh (2 chip) – C stepping (no support for Intel® RST PCIe Storage).
Support for PCIe AHCI Storage devices with RST in RAID mode (no Legacy OROM support).
Support for 16GB minimum cache requirement for SRT “Dual Drive SSD cache”.
Dynamic SSD cache sharing with Intel® Rapid Start Technology.
Support for 8GB minimum cache requirement for SSHD


Benchmarks for comparison:

AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 12.8.0.1016 (W7)

AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 13.0.01098 (W7)

Download link for Laptops:

http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/DriversForWin8.1/IRST/IRST_Intel_Win81_64_VER13001098.zip

After your download it, extract the ZIP folder, do not run the ASUS Installer, just manually update the IRST Controller from Device Manager by pointing it to the extracted directory

Yes the download link is from ASUS, but as long as you do not use their installer, it is the basic IRST driver from Intel with nothing more added. Their installer has some patch.exe and OEM.exe which you shouldn't touch, I deleted those EXEs actually

============================================================================

Here's the desktop version:

Intel Rapid Storage Technology Version 13.0.0.1098 WHQL



Source: http://www.station-drivers.com/index.php/downloads/func-startdown/434/

 

[Compman55]

Will this work for desktops? Z87 chipset to be exact...

 

[G73S]

Will this work for desktops? Z87 chipset to be exact...

No that's the laptop chipset version

Here's the desktop version:

Intel Rapid Storage Technology Version 13.0.0.1098 WHQL



Source: http://www.station-drivers.com/index.php/downloads/func-startdown/434/

 

[Fernando 1]

No that's the laptop chipset version
Here's the desktop version:
Intel Rapid Storage Technology Version 13.0.0.1098 WHQL

The driverpacks for desktops and mobiles are identical.
Intel has never released special RST drivers for desktop or laptop systems.
Nevertheless ASUS may offer "special" Intel RST drivers for their special desktop/laptop products.
By the way: The currently latest Intel RST drivers are v13.1.0.1058 WHQL.

 

[G73S]

The driverpacks for desktops and mobiles are identical.
Intel has never released special RST drivers for desktop or laptop systems.
Nevertheless ASUS may offer "special" Intel RST drivers for their special desktop/laptop products.
By the way: The currently latest Intel RST drivers are v13.1.0.1058 WHQL.

oh I see, thanks for that clarification. I do know however that Intel does provide different drivers for Mobile and Desktop for their Intel Chipset Software utility because they are usually labeled as mobile if it's for a laptop. that's why to be on the safe side I posted both the links from ASUS to ensure it's for a laptop and one from Station Driver which is usually the desktop version.

Thanks for that info, one less headache to worry about

 

[G73S]

ASRock has IRST version 13.1.0.1058 available for their Z97 boards, both the "F6 floppy" and full installation package:

http://www.asrock.com/support/download.asp?cat=Drivers

Now that Intel is not making mother boards anymore, or for another reason, they have not been posting the IRST version 13 drivers on their download pages. The latest version Intel has available is 12.9.0.1001.

Gigabyte has IRST version 13.0.3.1001 available for their Z97 boards. MSI has version 13.0.0.1098.

The release notes for IRST 13.0 are interesting, a partial listing below:

RST 13.0 release enables support for

Intel® 9 series chipset (Haswell refresh desktop platform).
Haswell H Mobile Refresh (2 chip) – C stepping (no support for Intel® RST PCIe Storage).
Support for PCIe AHCI Storage devices with RST in RAID mode (no Legacy OROM support).
Support for 16GB minimum cache requirement for SRT “Dual Drive SSD cache”.
Dynamic SSD cache sharing with Intel® Rapid Start Technology.
Support for 8GB minimum cache requirement for SSHD

Support for PCIe NVMe Storage devices will be enabled in 13.1 RST release.
13.0 UEFI utilities will require UEFI shell 1.0 to run. Support for UEFI shell 2.0 will be added in 13.1.
Due to Dynamic Storage Accelerator feature being enabled by default it might work on unsupported platforms and we recommend to disable it in the BIOS.
No RST support for PCIe storage devices enabled in AHCI mode.


The support for PCIe AHCI storage devices is interesting, does that mean they will be detected by the IRST Windows UI? Useable for creating RAID arrays? Also, support for PCIe NVMe devices in 13.1.

The one scary part is DSA being enabled by default, and might function on unsupported platforms (supported by Intel 8 and 9 series chipsets). That means it might be set to the low power, low performance mode if used on older Intel chipsets. The comment about disabling DSA in the BIOS on those platforms does not make sense, why would a board that does not support DSA have an option to enable or disable it in the BIOS? DSA can be set in the IRST Windows UI, but the option should not appear with unsupported chipsets.