SSD status incompatible

If you open the Rapid Storage Technology application and press the big Help button, then a new window opens and you can press the search button and then type "incompatible" within the search box and finally press the search button which will then list all matches. The first match indicates the following:

Incompatible
Cause: The volume was moved to another system that does not support the volume type and configuration.    

Solution: In this situation, volume data is accessible to the operating system and can be backed up, but the volume cannot operate because your system does not support its RAID configuration.
Here are your options:
■    Reconnect the volume to the computer where the volume was originally created and continue using it.
■    Delete the volume, and then create a new volume with a RAID configuration that is supported by the current system.

Warning: When a volume is deleted, all existing data on all the disks that are part of the volume is permanently lost. We recommend that you back up all valuable data before continuing.

So the questions to ask yourself are:

1. was your XPS 8500 SE delivered with the SSD installed?

2. was the SSD configured as the boot drive with the operating system installed on it? 

3. or was the SSD configured as a HDD cache?

4. or was the SSD configured in some other way (data drive)?

5. if the SSD was not delivered with your system, what disks did the system originally have when delivered and how were they configured?

6. how did you then install the SSD? In other words what did you do in detail?

It is important to know what physical disks exist and how they are presented to the OS by the iRST chipset. Luckily within the Rapid Storage Technology application itself, you should be able to see how the physical disks are logically presented to the OS in the Storage System View. :emotion-1:

But as a first step, it would also be worth your time to read the iRST help contents starting at the introduction and working through the help document to better understand raid technology..

My XPS came with the SSD already installed and the operating system was not installed on it.

Likely the SDD is acting as a HDD cache("Accelerate" in iRST phrasing) but i'm not sure.

Type Computer Management at the start button search field and click on Computer Management.

Go to Disk Management and look at your OS which is normally installed on two partitions on one disk, the first is a 100MB (or 200MB or even 2GB) partition called System (system, active primary partition) while the other is called OS C: drive (boot, crash dump, primary partition). In my case i have another disk called Data (D:) and it is in fact a raid 1 array comprising 2 HDDs.

Below is a snip of my disk manager where disk 0 is my 120GB SSD and disk 1 is my 560GB raid 1 array.

And from the iRST application, i can see

Note that i have only 4 buttons available (no "Accelerate" button) within the iRST windows application.