Did you know that you can fusion your HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and SSD (Solid State Drive) to have bigger memory with a speed of SSD drive, you can see this on most laptop today like the apple’s Fusion Drive, CacheExpress or some company call it Hybrid drive. You can achieve this by using the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver that will cache your frequently used program to your SSD for faster load and booting time.
To get started, you need to have the following item:
- Motherboard that supports SATA Raid and Intel Rapid Storage Technology.
- Any HDD Drive or Harddisk
- An SSD 30GB up.
- Windows XP, 7, 8 or 8.1 installer (We need to reformat your current OS, if your not using RAID format)
On mine, I used motherboard ASUS-P8Z77-M PRO, 500GB WD Caviar Blue Harddrive and Patriot 32GB SSD.
So follow the step below for the installation:
1. Remove all attach SATA drive from your motherboard, except for the drive where you install the OS.
2. Boot your PC to your BIOS and enable the RAID at the Sata Configuration.
3. Install your Windows OS (XP, 7, 8 or 8.1), dont forget to install the driver of your motherboard especially the intel chipsets. After that restart your PC.
4. Install the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver, you can download it from intel website at (SetupRST.exe).
5. Shut down your PC
6. Insert now your SSD to your SATA port and turn on your PC.
7. On Windows, go to “Disk Management” and right click your SSD drive then select “Delete Volume”
8. After deleting the volume, open the “Intel Rapid Storage Technology”.
9. Go to Status Tab, then at the “Acceleration using solid-state drives” click “Enable”
10. You can then now select your configuration, then click “OK”
11. Congrats! you have now enable the Intel Rapid Storage Technology on your SSD and HDD.
At first attempt, I have hard time succeeding on installing the Intel RST. like the tab “Acceleration” is not showing on the menu and some site tells you, you need to have RAID harddrive in order to use Intel RST. But the workaround is only simple, you just need to reformat your PC while in SATA RAID mode for the RST to work.
