Preview: Intel Official Beta RST Driver Release

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http://thessdreview.com/technology/intel-releases-new-rapid-storage-technology-drivers/

It has been suggested by other users that the new drivers resulted in an immediate increase in performance levels of RAID 0 drives which immediately raised the question as to whether TRIM is now enabled. As we haven’t a RAID enabled system we weren’t able to confirm or deny such but we were able to verify a claim that boot times had decreased somewhat with the new drivers.

Prior to our installing the new RST release, our test system commonly booted around the 16-17 second mark. Using a program called Boot Timer we ran 5 separate tests immediately after installation of the exact same system, each resulting in a boot time of 12-13 seconds consistently.
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Tested on my system and the result seems to be convincing.

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Install procedure:

extract to any dir.
open device manager
expand Storage controllers
right click Intel(r) Desktop.......SATA RAID Controller
update Driver Software..
point it to the dir you extracted the files in....
install it and reboot.

Rumours seems to imply it does TRIM on raided SSD's. Will log off for the night and see how it goes tomorrow.

Warning: This is not for the faint hearted. Update at your own risk.:D
 
I'll test the raid array first then I might test it's performance on single drive as well. If it can speed up driver loading on boot time, then, it must be able to do something on the drives performance as well.
 
vintage-x said:
is this just for intel drives or does it work for any SSD???
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Storage drivers, so will work for any SSD. Might be tuned to give best performance with Intel SSD's though.

I'm curious, but think I'll wait for the official release, don't really want to risk corrupt data if there's a bug.
 
Zarf said:
Storage drivers, so will work for any SSD. Might be tuned to give best performance with Intel SSD's though.
I'm curious, but think I'll wait for the official release, don't really want to risk corrupt data if there's a bug.
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Got a point there. I believed this is in preparation for their upcoming gen3 SSD's which seems to be slated for release in time for the new chipsets with embbeded USB3 and SATA III/6gbps capabilities and the highly anticipated Sandy Bridge.

As for the driver, there's been no hiccups on my system, 2xVertex 2E 60GB in Raid O, after I installed it 36 hours +/- ago and my impression so far is that, my system seems to be more zippy. Could be a placebo effect though.
 
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Just installed these drivers and they do seem to enable trim on my vertex raid0 array. If you run cmd as admin type the command - fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

you will get a response of either - DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled)
DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Windows TRIM commands are enabled)

I get DisableDeleteNotify = 0 so trim is on ??
 
sulli said:
Just installed these drivers and they do seem to enable trim on my vertex raid0 array. If you run cmd as admin type the command - fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

you will get a response of either - DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled)
DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Windows TRIM commands are enabled)

I get DisableDeleteNotify = 0 so trim is on ??
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I take it you ran this command before the Storage Controller driver update and it returned a 1 to inform TRIM was not enabled?
 
the DisableDeleteNotify setting doesn't indicate if TRIM commands are being received and executed correctly. It just means that the windows link in the chain (Windows -> Storage Controller -> Drive) is passing TRIM commands along.

I gave in to curiosity and put these on (after making a system image), they seem slightly faster, notably in Boots.
From what i've read TRIM still probably isn't enabled, the performance increase is because they have increased the cache size that the drivers use.
 
Zarf said:
the DisableDeleteNotify setting doesn't indicate if TRIM commands are being received and executed correctly. It just means that the windows link in the chain (Windows -> Storage Controller -> Drive) is passing TRIM commands along.

I gave in to curiosity and put these on (after making a system image), they seem slightly faster, notably in Boots.
From what i've read TRIM still probably isn't enabled, the performance increase is because they have increased the cache size that the drivers use.
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Thanks for being a Guinea Pig Zarf. I guess we can only hope Intel works out how to pass Trim through, soon.
 
domthecondom said:
so does trim work or not? If yes i would consider buying another 160gb one :p
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No way of really knowing, but I ran an AS-SSD bench and it's spitting out similar numbers to when the build was new (which was freshly HDDerased SSD's and nothing but Win7 installed).
I forgot to take a bench before I put the new RST drivers on though, so I'm not sure if performance was "fixed" by the new drivers, or if they hadn't actually degraded at all (three months use, currently around 70% full, all space has definitely been written to at least once).

Either way, I'm happy. Performance upgrade from RAID0 SSD in norml use isn't a noticable as the raw benchmark numbers imply, but it's pretty much a free bonus of the extra space. Doubling the write speeds is nice too as it gets rid of the Intels weak spot.
I actually find that my CPU is the bottleneck to my windows startup speeds now, my desktop gadget is one of the first things to pop up and it shows all 4 cores are saturated @3GHz.
 
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personally the longest bit of my boot sequence is the post... my mums ancient old HP pc has like a 2 nd post and a brand new win7 500gig samsung F3 (i think) and overall it boots faster than my 128gig M225 because the post on her pc is so fast. and mine takes ages.... on asus R2E :(
 
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