Amogh thank you very much for your help and prompt reply (I'm using Windows 7 64-bit Pro by the way). I have good, then bad, then good news, which I include here in the hope it will help others. Note there are MANY reboots in the following story, which I have missed out for brevity.
Firstly resetting the BIOS to defaults did indeed resolve my question, and I was able to successfully select the Intel RST option in the BIOS. Thanks!
Now the bad news: doing this caused Blue Screen of Death on boot up and I was unable to boot into Windows until I went back to the BIOS and reset the SATA Operation to AHCI.
To resolve this problem, I followed the instructions to edit my registry to re-enable the correct device driver, on the Microsoft support site here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976
Now I was able to select the Intel RST SATA option in the BIOS and boot into Windows 7. But then I encountered a new problem: the Intel Rapid Storage Technology app v11.6.0.1030 (installed last week from the Dell website) in Windows failed to run, giving me an "Unknown software error".
I downloaded v12.5.0.1033 directly from the Intel website and that fixed the problem. I've now been able to use the SSD drive by caching to accelerate my main hard disk, and can report already that boot times are at least halved.
One minor annoyance is several posts on this forum have said that a 32Gb SSD was the biggest size that could be used for caching, so that is the size I bought, however when I set it up, the Intel RST windows application said that it would support up to 64Gb. If I'd have known that, I'd have bought the bigger size.
However all is now well, and it's working. Thanks again Amogh.
I am having a similar issue, my XPS8300 had a drive failure, I replaced the drive with two new Seagate 1Gb drives (RAID 0) and installed a 64Gb SSD for the purpose of chaching the array. The drive that shipped with my XPS had Win 7 pre-installed and I did not have any media to re-install that, so I upgraded to Win 8 Pro. I have the whole thing working with the latest BIOS (A06) but I cannot see the acceleration tab either. I have downloaded and installed the latest IRST driver (12.8) from Intel but still no acceleration tab? Any thoughts or help appreciated.
DELL-Amogh G
1.5K Posts
1
July 12th, 2013 14:00
Hi GuiltyCol,
You may reset the BIOS settings to defaults. Please follow the steps below:
Please let me know if iSRT option comes after loading BIOS to defaults. Please share the operating system installed on the system.
Please remove the service tag from public view for security reasons.
Keep me posted with the information. I will be glad to assist further.
GuiltyCol
1 Rookie
•
9 Posts
0
July 14th, 2013 06:00
DELL-Amogh G
1.5K Posts
0
July 15th, 2013 14:00
Hi GuiltyCol,
Thank you for the response. I am glad that the issue is resolved and I appreciate your technical expertise.
Please feel free to reply for any further questions. I will be glad to assist further.
Maridd
3 Posts
0
September 6th, 2013 15:00
I am having a similar issue, my XPS8300 had a drive failure, I replaced the drive with two new Seagate 1Gb drives (RAID 0) and installed a 64Gb SSD for the purpose of chaching the array. The drive that shipped with my XPS had Win 7 pre-installed and I did not have any media to re-install that, so I upgraded to Win 8 Pro. I have the whole thing working with the latest BIOS (A06) but I cannot see the acceleration tab either. I have downloaded and installed the latest IRST driver (12.8) from Intel but still no acceleration tab? Any thoughts or help appreciated.