Just upgraded the Intel RST drivers on my X79 system to 13.1.0.1058 to see what fixes and changes were actually visible to my system.
I used one of the RST 13.1.0.1058 driver packages made available for the Asrock Z97 boards and it upgraded the X79 drivers just fine.
The most obvious change so far is that the OS sees as the cache accelerated HDD drive as an SSD (Corsair GT on my system).
This also changed the behavoir of some Windows 8.1 utiltiies. For example, the Windows defrag functions, such as boot optimization,
will no longer run against the RST accelerated HDD drive because it now thinks that it is an SSD - 3rd party defraggers still work OK.
The RST accelerated drive r/w performance seems a bit better, with disk benchmarks maxing out at over 540MBs.
I'm not sure what other RST features may now be available on my system using the 13.1.0.1058 drivers.
The RST OROM on my X79 system may not support all the new features available on the newer chipsets.
It is still unfortunate that RST can only accelerate one HDD drive (or HDD raid array).
There has been a lot of take about striped raid 0 SSD arrays being able to reach speeds of over 1 GB/sec (2x500MB/s per drive) using two 6GB SATA III ports. If that is true, I'd like to see RST accelerated caching support a 2xSSD raid 0 array which should in theory max out at about 1 GB/sec transfer rate.
I may also try to setup an RST 2xSSD raid 0 array and use it for PrimoCache L2STORAGE - should beat RST acceleration without a sweat while still keeping TBs of data on one, or more, HDD drive(s).
I used one of the RST 13.1.0.1058 driver packages made available for the Asrock Z97 boards and it upgraded the X79 drivers just fine.
The most obvious change so far is that the OS sees as the cache accelerated HDD drive as an SSD (Corsair GT on my system).
This also changed the behavoir of some Windows 8.1 utiltiies. For example, the Windows defrag functions, such as boot optimization,
will no longer run against the RST accelerated HDD drive because it now thinks that it is an SSD - 3rd party defraggers still work OK.
The RST accelerated drive r/w performance seems a bit better, with disk benchmarks maxing out at over 540MBs.
I'm not sure what other RST features may now be available on my system using the 13.1.0.1058 drivers.
The RST OROM on my X79 system may not support all the new features available on the newer chipsets.
It is still unfortunate that RST can only accelerate one HDD drive (or HDD raid array).
There has been a lot of take about striped raid 0 SSD arrays being able to reach speeds of over 1 GB/sec (2x500MB/s per drive) using two 6GB SATA III ports. If that is true, I'd like to see RST accelerated caching support a 2xSSD raid 0 array which should in theory max out at about 1 GB/sec transfer rate.
I may also try to setup an RST 2xSSD raid 0 array and use it for PrimoCache L2STORAGE - should beat RST acceleration without a sweat while still keeping TBs of data on one, or more, HDD drive(s).
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