No Accelerate button/tab on Intel Rapid Storage window

Question

I have an ASUS P8Z68 motherboard with a Corsair SSD as my primary boot drive. I have a TB standard hard drive as a secondary data drive. I am attempting to use an older Intel SSD as a cache on the hard drive with Intel's Smart Response caching. After several reboots I finally got my SATA controller in RAID mode but when I open the Rapid Storage Technology window there is no Accelerate tab.

I've updated the ASUS and Intel drivers, downloaded the latest version of RST from Intel and switched the Intel SSD from the primary SATA ports to the secondary ones (as referenced from the answer to this question: Intel Rapid Storage Manager has no Accelerate tab. How can I fix it?). Still no button.

Any ideas?

Solution 1

Finally got the Accelerate button to appear! The issue appears to be that I had formatted the SSD when it needed to be Unallocated space:

Once I deleted the volume and re-started the Intel Rapid Storage Technology application the Accelerate button was present and I was able to use the SSD to accelerate the HD.

Solution 2

it looks like the support for the "hybrid" drive/SSD caching was removed in anything after v 15.7 of the rst software in favor of an intel optane memory option.. guess they're greedy and want to sell more optane memory instead of allowing for the ssd caching like they did before.

Solution 3

I tried everything above, nothing worked.

In the end I downgraded the driver by the one provided by manufacturer [Dell] (v12 instead of v16) and it works now.

Solution 4

If setting up RAID in BIOS, emptying the SSD/cache disk and putting it offline still doesn't work, you should shrink the C: drive a bit. Worked for me!

Solution 5

Acceleration with Intel RST is only possible if the SATA port does not have the hot-plug mode enabled in the BIOS. Check the SATA port mode in the BIOS and disable hot-plugging if it's enabled.

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Comments

[Yuriy]

Hi, I asked a similar question today (superuser.com/questions/609392/…), then found yours, tried to remove the partition - no effect. Can you have a look by any chance please?

[PrplHaz4]

Thanks a ton for this. I actually also had to change it from AHCI to Intel... in the BIOS.

[Yevgen]

This is the best info I found so far so will give it a shot. Just to confirm, is it required to have SATA configured to RAID in Bios or should it also work with AHCI?

[bgmCoder]

For me, I still got no "Acceleration" tab, but after I deleted the partition on the disk, THEN there was a button-link in Performance that said, "enable acceleration". And it worked!

[confetti]

Do you happen to have any references/sources for that information?

[carlin.scott]

It may not be greed so much as saving the Intel engineers from having to maintain two similar but different code bases that do nearly the same thing. They also get money for Optane but provide SSD caching for free. PrimoCache provides ssd and memory caching for $30 after a 60 day trial. I'm on day 2 of the trial and am blown away by the product; it's likely better than RST Accelerate.

[blaimi]

You can still download Version 14 from the official download page: downloadcenter.intel.com/de/product/55005/… (show more). Once downgraded you can setup the cache and upgrade to version 17 again. tested on Win10 1909

[Philip Ngai]

That makes a lot of sense, thanks!

[Philip Ngai]

The sad part is, Optane is only supported by a small subset of Intel processors and chipsets. Otherwise I'd be perfectly happy to try Optane.

[hanjo]

For me version 15 is the latest that I can use to set up and manage the acceleration. Once I upgrade to 16, it continues to work, but is not manageable any longer...