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I have an ASUS P8Z68 motherboard with a Corsair SSD as my primary boot drive. I have a TB standard hard drive as a secondary data drive. I am attempting to use an older Intel SSD as a cache on the hard drive with Intel's Smart Response caching. After several reboots I finally got my SATA controller in RAID mode but when I open the Rapid Storage Technology window there is no Accelerate tab.

Missing Accelerate Button

I've updated the ASUS and Intel drivers, downloaded the latest version of RST from Intel and switched the Intel SSD from the primary SATA ports to the secondary ones (as referenced from the answer to this question: Intel Rapid Storage Manager has no Accelerate tab. How can I fix it?). Still no button.

Any ideas?

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  • It's a bit hit and miss. I had to reboot in ahci and then back to raid for it to show up before. Once it's working it will work great though. That being said I did spend a full day trying to make the damn thing just show that accelerate tab. Good luck!
    – Justin
    Commented Feb 4, 2013 at 23:00
  • In the Device Manager, does the Intel controller show as a RAID controller? And make sure both the SSD and HDD are plugged into native SATA ports (SSD in a gray port. HDD in a gray or blue port.). Also, remove any partitions on the SSD you plan to use as a cache. (You can add it back later.)
    – David Schwartz
    Commented Feb 4, 2013 at 23:12
  • Thanks for the ideas. @DavidSchwartz I tried moving ports again both the SSD and HD are on the same bank (port 5 & 6) for the last test with still no luck. One of the other posts said the SSD needed a partition so I had created one. Also removed it and tried again with no luck.
    – Brad Patton
    Commented Feb 6, 2013 at 15:27
  • @Justin I can try that next I had enough trouble just getting it in RAID mode I was reluctant to go down that path again. I haven't rebooted my computer this much in a year. I wish the button was there and it just told me what was wrong. :(
    – Brad Patton
    Commented Feb 6, 2013 at 15:29
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    It would be lovely if Intel did that, but they always seems to be great at giving cryptic messages or in this case, none at all. It is possible though, but I can't remember one particular thing that made mine work sorry. I think it was just trying everything I could find on google ;)
    – Justin
    Commented Feb 6, 2013 at 22:39

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
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Finally got the Accelerate button to appear! The issue appears to be that I had formatted the SSD when it needed to be Unallocated space:

Disk mgmt

Once I deleted the volume and re-started the Intel Rapid Storage Technology application the Accelerate button was present and I was able to use the SSD to accelerate the HD.

RST

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  • Hi, I asked a similar question today (superuser.com/questions/609392/…), then found yours, tried to remove the partition - no effect. Can you have a look by any chance please?
    – Yuriy
    Commented Jun 19, 2013 at 8:00
  • Thanks a ton for this. I actually also had to change it from AHCI to Intel... in the BIOS.
    – PrplHaz4
    Commented Oct 16, 2013 at 2:57
  • This is the best info I found so far so will give it a shot. Just to confirm, is it required to have SATA configured to RAID in Bios or should it also work with AHCI?
    – Yevgen
    Commented Nov 27, 2016 at 7:39
  • For me, I still got no "Acceleration" tab, but after I deleted the partition on the disk, THEN there was a button-link in Performance that said, "enable acceleration". And it worked!
    – bgmCoder
    Commented Apr 2, 2018 at 23:28
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If setting up RAID in BIOS, emptying the SSD/cache disk and putting it offline still doesn't work, you should shrink the C: drive a bit. Worked for me!

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I tried everything above, nothing worked.

In the end I downgraded the driver by the one provided by manufacturer [Dell] (v12 instead of v16) and it works now.

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    You can still download Version 14 from the official download page: downloadcenter.intel.com/de/product/55005/… (show more). Once downgraded you can setup the cache and upgrade to version 17 again. tested on Win10 1909
    – blaimi
    Commented Feb 8, 2020 at 18:26
  • For me version 15 is the latest that I can use to set up and manage the acceleration. Once I upgrade to 16, it continues to work, but is not manageable any longer...
    – hanjo
    Commented Sep 8, 2021 at 14:48
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it looks like the support for the "hybrid" drive/SSD caching was removed in anything after v 15.7 of the rst software in favor of an intel optane memory option.. guess they're greedy and want to sell more optane memory instead of allowing for the ssd caching like they did before.

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  • Do you happen to have any references/sources for that information?
    – confetti
    Commented Sep 11, 2018 at 18:38
  • It may not be greed so much as saving the Intel engineers from having to maintain two similar but different code bases that do nearly the same thing. They also get money for Optane but provide SSD caching for free. PrimoCache provides ssd and memory caching for $30 after a 60 day trial. I'm on day 2 of the trial and am blown away by the product; it's likely better than RST Accelerate.
    – carlin.scott
    Commented Dec 19, 2018 at 18:24
  • The sad part is, Optane is only supported by a small subset of Intel processors and chipsets. Otherwise I'd be perfectly happy to try Optane.
    – Philip Ngai
    Commented Mar 28, 2021 at 7:22
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Acceleration with Intel RST is only possible if the SATA port does not have the hot-plug mode enabled in the BIOS. Check the SATA port mode in the BIOS and disable hot-plugging if it's enabled.

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  • That makes a lot of sense, thanks!
    – Philip Ngai
    Commented Mar 28, 2021 at 7:21

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