I have an Intel z170 motherboard now that I have installed my old components on after a motherboard and CPU upgrade. I was running Intel RST on my old hacked bios z77 motherboard with the NVMe drive (Samsung SM951 256GB) as the OS boot drive and using a 60gb SSD to accelerate a 2TB programs drive. This ran fine with no problems with the speed of the NVMe drive (RAID mode is needed to accelerate an HDD using an SSD). Now that I have the z170 setup I tried the same drive configuration, however the NVMe performance is hit hard, switching to AHCI brings the performance up to par, but this means I cannot accelerate the 1TB programs HDD and that makes it painfully slow. I have installed the Samsung drivers for the NVMe drive, but they only load in AHCI mode, when I switch to RAID the standard Microsoft driver loads instead. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can get full performance from my NVMe drive in RAID mode on the z170 motherboard?

Here is a benchmark:


Benchmark on the old system:


EDIT by Fernando: Screenshot with the old benchmark results replaced by an attachment (the original image did not show up)

Hi Fernando, thanks for replying to my message. I understand what you are saying, however I have used SRT for the last 4 years with great effect on my programs drive, it accelerates the launching and level loading of the games I play off that HDD as well as making some smaller programs I launch frequently much more responsive. I don't use this HDD for storage at all, I have another HDD for that. I have managed to increase the performance by doing a reinstall of all the drivers, the SM951 no longer show up as SCSI now. Also I noticed that the benchmark results fluctuate a lot. However the write performance is still down by about 200MB/s on sequential write over the old results, that is not such a big deal so I will keep it in RAID mode so I can use SRT. Thanks again for your attention.