I stumbled onto your site when looking for a Intel X79 RAID/RST solution, and first of all, I'd like to say thank you and give you big props for an amazing amount of work!

I am using Windows Server 2012 R2 (RTM) and an Asus P9X79LE motherboard. I have 2 SSDs in RAID 1 .

When I install 2012R2, the default driver version is 12.0.1.1019. The main problem that I have with this is that there is no notification for array errors. Despite it being a 12.x driver, I can't seem to find RST that will install on 2012R2 / X79. Also, according to TrimCheck, TRIM is not working.

I can install RSTe 3.6.0.1090, and RSTe works. However, again, according to TrimCheck, TRIM does not seem to work.

So, this leaves me with a couple of questions:

1. Am I better off with 12.0.1.1019 or 3.6.0.1090?
2. Is there any way to get RST monitoring to work with the default 12.0.1.1019?
3. Is there any advantage to forcing 12.8 onto Server 2012 R2?

What I must have is a way of seeing if the RAID volume is degraded by way of some notification. I would love to have TRIM and would jump through some hoops to get it, but I've overprovisioned the 1TB drive down to an 800GB volume (when I create the mirror set, the maximum size is 887GB), so I think I'll be ok for the life of this system.

Incidentally, I am using Samsung 840 EVO drives - two in RAID 1 and one out of RAID; in case anyone is curious, the Samsung toolbox correctly identifies both the RAID set and the lone drive, but it cannot perform optimization, firmware updates, overprovisioning, or set RAPID on the array or the drives in the array. For the non-array drive, all of the functions work, except setting RAPID -- it's offered, but fails.

If anyone has any words of advice with 2012R2 and X79, I'm eager to listen! Thank you in advance.

Fernando, thank you very much for the thorough answer!

Hi Talys,
I wanted to ask you a question regarding your install of IRSTe 3.6 onto server 2012r2. Did it allow you to install the software? I have found that enabling trim in a raid 1 volume causes problems. Unfortunately Intel website says that 3.6 IRSTe is not supported on server 2012r2. I have stress tested 3.8, 3.9, 4.1, 4.2 drivers with 2 ssds in raid 1 and the result is always the same, the volume falls apart and a parity check shows thousands and thousands of parity errors.

Please have a look at this thread.
Problems with SSDs in RAID-1 using RSTe are discussed there.