Building new system and desperately need help with Smart Response Technology

[chadnorton1975]

Hello,
I built a system with a Biostar TZ68A+ RCH motherboard, 8GB of RAM, and two hard drives. One drive is a Western Digital 2.5TB SATA III and the other is a 64GB SATA III SSD.

Originally I installed Windows 7 on the SSD and then attempted to setup Intel's Smart Response Technology to combine the two drives into a single fast drive. This did not work. The 2.5TB drive simply stopped showing up at all. I went into the BIOS and made sure the RAID setting were correct. When I went to the RAID configuration it would only recognize 120GB and would not allow me to use the other 2.3TB's of storage.

Can anyone tell me how to run windows 7 with Intel's Smart Response Technology and use all 2.6TB's of storage space?

 

[techguy911]

Hello,
I built a system with a Biostar TZ68A+ RCH motherboard, 8GB of RAM, and two hard drives. One drive is a Western Digital 2.5TB SATA III and the other is a 64GB SATA III SSD.

Originally I installed Windows 7 on the SSD and then attempted to setup Intel's Smart Response Technology to combine the two drives into a single fast drive. This did not work. The 2.5TB drive simply stopped showing up at all. I went into the BIOS and made sure the RAID setting were correct. When I went to the RAID configuration it would only recognize 120GB and would not allow me to use the other 2.3TB's of storage.

Can anyone tell me how to run windows 7 with Intel's Smart Response Technology and use all 2.6TB's of storage space?

Here is a guide on: How to Set Up Intel Smart Response SSD Caching Technology

 

[Guest]

Well, you`ll need to start over at this point. Making sure raid is enabled within bios is the first step. Then reinstall win 7 to your HDD. After installed and on your desktop, open intel rapid storage and be sure to update it first. Once done there, simply enable accelleration in the IRST program. May do some good to google `how to setup SSD cache z68`

 

[chadnorton1975]

Here is a guide on: How to Set Up Intel Smart Response SSD Caching Technology

Thanks for the link techguy911, I do appreciate it. I've read this manual over several times. The problem I am having now is that I can't even get the Windows 7 installation to recognize that any drives exist. I have went back and forth from ACHI to RAID probably over 20 times now. The computer is doing crazy stuff, first it said it maxed out at 120GB, then i went back to ACHI and then when i switched it back to RAID it saw it as a single 280GB drive, then i tried to format that, then it stopped recognizing it all and said there was no drives found. I again switched it back to ACHI after which windows installation then saw 5 drives (?) with two primary and two system info drives that were about 60mb only. switched back to ACHI, rebooted, switched back to RAID again and then all drives disappeared again. went into Biostars RAID utility, deleted all drives and added them back. then rebooted again. Windows then saw a single 280GB drive and this time allowed me to try an installation. windows setup copied files, then took about 20 minutes for the next step of "expanding windows files", followed immediately by it resetting itself and starting over from scratch again as if it hadn't loaded anything.

This is frustrating for me because I built this system more than 6 months ago and it worked great except that the SSD is too small and kept running out of space. I tried to go with this ISRT thing because I was tired of manually moving files around and using the Steamtool to move all my games. After 9 hours of scouring the internet and reading and all this work I wish I had just left well enough alone.

 

[chadnorton1975]

At this point I fear Ive damaged the SSD so I physically unplugged the HDD and Im trying a clean install to make sure it works at all.