Why is my Hybrid Disk not Active?

Question

Now that I found out that I do have a hybrid disk (AXM13S2-24GM-B), I'm starting to believe it is not active. Last night I started up Task Manager and I see 2 disks - Disk 0 (C:) and Disk 1.

Disk 0 appears to be active -

Disk 1 appears to be not active. It's been this way for at least 3 hours of active use, both Metro and Desktop use.

This is supposed to be the Solid State part of my Hybrid Drive, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything, at least not from the perspective of the Task Manager tool. Does anyone know of any additional tools that I could you for analysis or do you know if there is some way to activate this part of the drive?

Thank you in advance!

Solution

You don't have a Hybrid drive. You have a small SSD which can act as a cache to the HDD. This technique is called Intel Smart Response. Make sure you fit the system requirements (look into the BIOS for the RAID settings):

System Requirements

For a system to support Intel® Smart Response Technology it must have the following:

Intel® Z68/Z77/H77/Q77 Express Chipset-based desktop board
Intel® Core™ Processor in the LGA 1155 package
System BIOS with SATA mode set to RAID
Intel Rapid Storage Technology software 10.5 version release or later
Single hard disk drive or multiple drives in a single RAID volume
Solid-state drive (SSD) with a minimum capacity of 18.6GB

Inside the Intel® RST software click Enable acceleration under either the Status or Accelerate menu.

Here you must select the SSD and the amount of Cache you want to use:

Comments

[Brad Patton]

From reading the other question you don't have a hybrid drive but have two drives (a SSD and a HD). A hybrid drive embeds the SSD and looks like one drive to the system. If you go to admin tools disk mgmt what does that show? My gues is that the OS is installed on the hd and the SSD isn't being used.

[Mark Allen]

Also, depending on your motherboard, you might be able to use the two of them together AS IF they were a single hybrid drive. My ASUS motherboard has that... I think. I don't have an SSD to try it with, and I believe using it that way is destructive/requires a reinstall, so it might not be worth doing if it's available.

[Mark]

This may be the answer. Shouldn't this application have been installed already if it was supported and, more even so, the functionality was advertised? I've been able to verify requirements 1 and 2, but 3 is tough. From what I read, it needs to have been set up prior to installing the OS. I'm a little worried about installing it and configuring it...my new laptop could be a paperweight it's not supported.

[magicandre1981]

is this a new laptop? Go to the BIOS, change the setting, boot into Windows, install the driver and change the values in the application.

[Mark]

Yes it is a new laptop. I went into the BIOS and didn't see any settings to where I could change SATA mode to RAID. I can add screen shots of the BIOS if that would help, but it's really not there. I plan on going for it anyway, later tonight - installing the software and changing the values...what's the worst that could happen :-)

[magicandre1981]

ok, set the value to RAID and use the software and tell me if this worked.

[Mark]

I saw a little spike in the Disk transfer rate! I installed the software and turned off Windows write-cache buffer flushing. They say this allows the Intel Rapid Storage Technology to work. However, it does not have the Enable Acceleration options. The whole Acceleration Tab isn't even there. It does seem to be a little faster just turning off the Windows write-cache buffer flushing.

[magicandre1981]

which Laptop do you use? Get the latest Intel driver version and test it again.

[Mark]

Sony - VAIO T Series Ultrabook 15.5" Touch-Screen Laptop - 8GB Memory - Silver Mist laptop. I think I have the latest driver, but I'll check tonight for sure.

[magicandre1981]

this is strange. Set the SATA type to RAID and get the latest driver version from Intel: downloadcenter.intel.com/…

[Graham Perrin]

A Wikipedia definition of hybrid drive does include SRT, but that should devalue this answer. +1