Intel RST drivers vs MS native drivers 840pro W7 single drive

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jarablue

[H]ard|Gawd
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I have an 840Pro ssd with Windows 7 (no raid, single drive setup). Using a Z87-A Asus board. Is there any benefit at all to use the Intel RST drivers vs the MS native drivers? I am running AHCI in my bios. I could of sworn when I installed the Intel RST drivers before my last reformat, my sequential read/writes went down but my random went up.

Anyone have a clue what may have caused that? What are the better drivers?
 
When we enter the second gen of ssd, and TRIM support was introduced, the only drivers that supported it was the windows default, but intel quickly released their RST that worked better, in my experience was slightly faster all across in benchmarks, from there i haven't looked back, i always install RST after chipset and never question it.

One thing that you have to take in account when benchmarking is that new drive with nothing in it will give different numbers than a filled and used drive, personally i just do an initial test to see if im close to what others are getting, but after that i just let it be and never benchamark it again, unless im having issues.
 
Well it looks like installing the Intel RST driver definitely sped up my random read and writes and also sequentials. Was always under the impression that the RST drivers were only need for raid. But it seems a single drive benefits from them as well. I think I'll always install it from now on.

Stock MS dirvers -

beforeintel.jpg



Intel RST drivers -

afterintel.jpg
 
And then there's all the people who end up with SCSI drives instead of SATA6.0 with IRST. Kinda sucks. I blame ASUS.
 
I noticed in the intel rst driver app in my system tray there is an option for Dynamic Storage Accelerator. Whenever I change it to enable and close the app and reopen it, it goes right back to disable. It mentions in the help file that your bios dynamic storge accelerator bit must be set for this feature to work. Does anyone know if the Asus Z87-A supports this feature? I can't find any info out about it.

Edit: Found the setting in my bios and enabled it. See what happens.
 
Last edited:
Bluesun311 said:
And then there's all the people who end up with SCSI drives instead of SATA6.0 with IRST. Kinda sucks. I blame ASUS.
Click to expand...
I dont think its Asus fault, on my MSI my SSD also appears as SCSI, i think its haswell sata III controller/ intel rst fault.
 
My drive is showing up in device manager as SCSI also. I thought that was only cosmetic. No?
 
Abula said:
I dont think its Asus fault, on my MSI my SSD also appears as SCSI, i think its haswell sata III controller/ intel rst fault.
Click to expand...

K that settles it I blame Intel. It's not new though so not just Haswell. If you leave it like that it hurts performance. If it says your Sata drive is scsi just use the windows ahci controller driver. It's bs tho. I heard the Intel ssd's don't have the issue. Wondering if it's different in win8.1? My copy arrives to make my life more difficult this afternoon.
 
Leaving your drive reported as SCSI in device manager hurts it's performance?
 
All I can say is with Intel AHCI controller driver installed I get a look at the welcome screen. With Windows AHCI driver it insta boots into windows. I'd be curious about TRIM, too, but I'm sure everything's fine or Intel would fix it, right?
 
Trim is supported on a single drive environment regardless of RST so long as the board is set to AHCI mode. As soon as you move to raid you will lose trim on Most raid controllers with the exception of the RST chipset based controllers.
 
The "SCSI" ident is an old miniport issue that has to do with Windows. This is normal. The RST drivers are the best drivers to use, always.
 
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