Hi,

a customer of mine has bought a new PC (Fujitsu Esprimo P956 E94+) with an 256GB SSD and 5TB Harddisk and he wants to use the SSD as accelerater (Write/Read cache) for the 5TB Disk.

Newer Intel Chipsets support such a configuration. It is called Smart Response Technology.

I installed Windows 10 Professional and the Intel RST Driver and Software (Version 14.8.0.1042 , latest version at 07.04.2016)

A requierment is that in the System BIOS the mode of the SATA Controller must switch from “AHCI”  to “RAID”.

The disklayout which I used is

• Disklayout GPT (UEFI Boot) to use the whole Disk for C:
• EFI Partition, MSR Partition (both created automatically by Windows Setup)
• Add the rest of the disk as one large Partition, Windows Drive C:

After installing Windows I installed the Intel RST Software package but unfortunately after starting configurator the option to activate the acceleration is not available 🙁 .

A lot of testing later I found out that the problem is the disk layout. When the whole disk (one big partition C or two partition C: and D:) is used at installation time the ability to enable the acceleration does not appear in Intel RST tool.

I just shrinked the last partition for 1MB by Windows Disk Manager, reinstalled Intel RST Software aand the rebooted the Computer. From now on I’ve been able to enable the acceleration 🙂

It seems there is a bug in the installer of the RST Package when the whole disk is used during Windows setup so that the Smart response technique isn’t enabled.

Michael