Dell Studio XPS 8100 - Intel Rapid Storage Technology update - safe? SOLVED

Spent hours tonight trying to figure out if updating the Intel RST driver on my Studio XPS 8100 desktop machine was going to hurt anything.  

It started off when I bought a Seagate 3TB drive, only to figure out that Windows 7 64 bit was telling me that the drive was 746gb.  There were lots of questions about this topic online, but what got me understanding the problem was this Seagate link:

knowledge.seagate.com/.../218615en

That led me to an Intel page where I could download newer Intel RST drivers.

www.intel.com/.../imsm

But here was the issue.  The Dell site for this machine was telling me that RST driver 9.5 was the latest one available, while the Seagate page indicated that anything under driver version 10 wasn't going to work.  Even hitting "Update Driver" in Device Manager for the "Series 5" RAID was advising that 9.5 was the latest & greatest.  But when you'd start to install the newer version from the Intel site, the info page was clear in saying that, once you had installed the driver, you couldn't turn back and uninstall it later.  This left me scared that I was going to try to install the RST drivers but end up messing it up where I couldn't access the boot drive or anything.  (The RST driver I installed tonight was version 13.2.4.1000 of the SetupRST.exe file, the latest as of today, 1/25/2015.)  Well, I'm here to say that I installed the latest version just mentioned, and not only did it install beautifully and without any issues, but going to the Disk Management under Administrative Tools correctly reported the size of the drive, let me format it, and I was off to the races.  

So, bottom line - you have an XPS 8100, with Windows 7 (in my case, 64 bit), and you've got a new 3TB drive and it's only seeing 746gb for the size?  Go to the Intel site listed above, download the SetupRST.exe file listed, install it (it'll make you reboot not once but twice), and re-check the size of the drive in Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management, and voila, the drive will be the right size. 

I will say, I did have to right click on the drive name and hit "Convert to GPT Disk" as learned on a different site.  Apparently volumes over 2gb in size will require this.  And FYI, I was adding this 3TB drive as a second drive, while leaving the original drive in the boot disk spot. 

Anyway, that was my experience, which took hours.  Hopefully this link helps some of you to save some time and definitely save some worry about corrupting your boot disk.

Best of luck.

AC