cannot enable intel RST with AHCI in BIOS?

carbide

Honorable
Oct 29, 2013
82
0
10,640
Sorry, probably a storage 101 question that is obvious to many (couldn't google anything relevant)

I have installed the intel RST software in win 7 which reports it's not running. when I enable it in the BIOS it switches disks from AHCI to RAID, then promptly says there's no supported disk.

Is having AHCI enabled a replacement for using intel RST? are they exclusive I mean?

I have a ssd boot drive and a 3tb mechanical logical drive, so am not needing to utilise RAID of any kind.

When I first put the system together it was in RAID mode, and I've changed the settings in win 7 to install AHCI drivers and am running in that mode.

Is best performance to just use AHCI and remove the RST software?
 
Solution
You don't need Intel RST drivers if you are not going to (1) use an SSD cache for the HDD (which makes no sense to me now that SSDs are big and cheap), or (2) use RAID. I would just delete the drivers, but they should not cause any issues since they are not being used.

Technically, AHCI is a subset of the RAID commands so it should not affect performance even if you use the RAID SATA mode in your bios, but some SSD software (like Samsung Magician) will not work unless the bios mode is AHCI.

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
You don't need Intel RST drivers if you are not going to (1) use an SSD cache for the HDD (which makes no sense to me now that SSDs are big and cheap), or (2) use RAID. I would just delete the drivers, but they should not cause any issues since they are not being used.

Technically, AHCI is a subset of the RAID commands so it should not affect performance even if you use the RAID SATA mode in your bios, but some SSD software (like Samsung Magician) will not work unless the bios mode is AHCI.
 
Solution