Should I use Intel RST?

[Cmerrell]

hey all, I a putting my new rig together and I am wondering if I should try to use intel rapid storage or not. I've never used it before but am certainly willing to try if there are benefits. I have the following drives that will be installed:
960 evo 500g (boot drive)
2x 850 evo 500g
840 evo 250g
1tb spinner

Thanks in advance!

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Cmerrell -- there is "IRST" which is the management software and driver for the Intel controllers, and there is "ISRT" which is a part of IRST. Intel Rapid Storage, versus Intel Smart Response. I'm assuming that you mean ISRT.

With the Intel SSD-caching, you only get to pair a single SSD with a single HDD. I can't remember if you can have more than one pair. Like Samsung's RAPID RAM-caching, it is proprietary to the product.

You can look at my "Bad-Ass Caching" thread if I was right in assuming that you meant ISRT.

As to IRST. M$ has their own native AHCI driver, which probably works fine (because I used it for a long time.) Intel improved their own driver, and some say it works better. I'm using the Intel driver now.

 

[energee]

As to IRST. M$ has their own native AHCI driver, which probably works fine (because I used it for a long time.) Intel improved their own driver, and some say it works better. I'm using the Intel driver now.

Yeah. I've always used Intel's RST drivers for plain old AHCI on my Windows OS. I don't install the bloated software suite bundled with it though.

 

[grimpr]

I would advice against it, brings nothing to gain from, microsofts default ahci is better from stability and compatibity viewpoint.

 

[stewart497]

I would advice against it, brings nothing to gain from, microsofts default ahci is better from stability and compatibity viewpoint.

I also agree with you in this brand

 

[Hi-Fi Man]

If you are running a RAID setup I highly recommend using RST. Especially if it's RAID 0 as you won't be able to enable write back caching without it. Some RST drivers also perform better than others as well depending on chipset and firmware RST version.

Fernando has a great forum with a lot of good resources on it, http://www.win-raid.com/t362f23-Performance-of-the-Intel-RST-RSTe-AHCI-RAID-Drivers.html

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I would advice against it, brings nothing to gain from, microsofts default ahci is better from stability and compatibity viewpoint.

I would have been in total agreement several months ago, but there were vary good reasons for my conversion to the Intel driver. I don't even mind the bloatware, which would be easy to avoid if I wanted. On a slower system, an older system -- I might opt for the Native drivers. Intel may have tidied up their act with more recent driver versions.

As for AHCI versus RAID. Unless something has changed, you need RAID-mode for ISRT pairing of SSD and HDD. Tell me if that's changed at all. Then, I discovered that to at least give RAPID a tryout for a Sammy 840 Pro, I needed AHCI. I'd rather have the option to use both AHCI and RAID disks, and that would mean a second controller. For the AHCI, you could rely on a PCIE x1 card, and use the onboard controller for RAID. If you want to use the onboard for AHCI, then you'd need a RAID-capable PCIE card and it would likely require at least x2, x4 or even x8 PCI-E.

Now -- I don't want to use RAPID anymore. If I want to cache to RAM, I'll use PrimoCache, and there are other software alternatives as well. But I want to be able to move drives around from system to system. I think, just for data, you could move a single drive configured under RAID-mode and not part of an array to an AHCI configuration and there shouldn't be a problem reading and writing to it.

 

[Dasa2]

if you want to have a play with caching download the 30 day trial of primocache you could even play with ram caching then if you have enough spare
you have so many ssd that im guessing the 1tb hdd is just storage and its performance probably doesn't matter than much

possible benefits will depend on your usage