You deserve a pint of good beer!

Now I just look for the "Renesas USB3.0 Drivers" that obviously MSI does not provide the official website. Ok, I understand that the motherboard is a product of 2011 (old? Bah!) But leave the development for its users ... very sad! Heheh!

Thanks again ... I'll let you know.
K

Hello, Fernando

I have an pretty old system:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33MHz
Intel DG45ID (Chipset G45 - ICH10R - BIOS 0135) - AMI
2x 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA-III 7200rpm on RAID 0 (outdated Intel MSM RAID ROM 8.8.0.1009/8.0.0.1038)
4x 2GB Corsair XMS DDR2-800MHz
Windows 7 Pro x64 (all hotfixes 01/2016)

The RST driver on the support page is the 9.6.0.1014
What do you think would be the best RAID ROM module version for it?
Also what would be the RST driver for best performance and/or stability?
And what do you think would the best combo?

Thanks.

Hey there... lots of useful information here, thanks!

I've got a pretty ancient machine that I've just upgraded to Win7 and am having some RAID issues with it.
It was running some version of RST on Win XP, quite happily, but after installing Win7 I am stunned to find that I can't find an RST driver that will install.
It's an ICH7R system (ASRock ConRoeXFire-eSATA2 mobo with a Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU).

Many years ago I used the Matrix drivers, but at some point I found a newer driver (RST) which worked - so long ago I can't remember which one.
The Intel driver update tool (which I installed and tried earlier today) was totally useless - it only offered me a chipset INF file (unless of course I need to do that first and then other stuff will work??) but nothing at all for the RAID interface.

Right now the machine is only running on one of the two drives from the RAID1 array (I wanted to get Win7 fully running before rebuilding and blowing away the 2nd drive, which still contains XP), so I suspect that if I'm stuck it would be safe to just swap over to the other drive (making certain the Win7 drive is disconnected!) to try and check what driver version was running OK on XP - BUT I'm a bit concerned that the RAID chipset might have NVRAM and thus might complain that the old drive is invalid, having already seen it offline on previous boots... Any ideas if that's safe?
Failing that I might be able to stuff the drive in another machine to look at the contents.

So far though, from the Intel website I have downloaded and tried:
- the 14.8 RST driver - wouldn't work, but it kindly told me to look in the log file from which I worked out that it doesn't support ICH7R. Fair enough...
- the 11.7 RST driver - also wouldn't work, but didn't tell me why. I then noticed, in the readme.txt for it, that it requires a Celeron/Pentium/vPro CPU which seems pretty bizarre. It's not clear to me if my C2D qualifies (I would never call it a Pentium and indeed Intel don't either :)), and I was guessing that this was the problem until I read someone else in this forum mention using a C2D happily with the 14.8 driver... But if that wasn't the problem then I'm stuck and could use advice, please! :-))
- the 8.9 Matrix driver: this seems to be working, but it's ancient and I seem to remember my system being somewhat unstable in the past until I updated to an RST version.

Advice greatly appreciated folks...

OK, brilliant, thanks!
I will try that later today.
(I did already check my other disk btw and found that XP was using 11.2.)

The crazy thing is that Intel's own docs for 11.7 say that it *does* support ICH7R. They are fibbing, by the sound of it...

PS: why on earth do Intel not list RST 11.2 drivers for Windows 7 on their website any more? There is nothing between Matrix 8.9 and RST 11.6 :-S

PPS: the other thing which has just struck me is that I didn't load any drivers during OS installation - didn't think this was needed, since the setup was able to see the raid volume. But the Intel README.TXT makes me think I might be wrong about this, which would mean I still can't install 10.1/11.2 without a complete OS reinstallation?

Update: 11.2 worked perfectly (didn't even need the modded version) - thanks so much Fernando! This resource you've put together here is fantastic.

(It compensates wonderfully for Intel having dropped the ball pretty badly and making the lives of their customers stupidly difficult - in my case, both by saying that 11.7 supports ICH7R when it doesn't, and then compounding it by no longer providing the RST version that actually does work on my hardware!)

PS: my ROM is waaay old btw - v5.6.xxx - probably not much point in upgrading?

Zitat von Fernando im Beitrag #294

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your Intel ICH7R SATA RAID Controller has another DeviceID, which is not supported by the newer Intel RST RAID ROM modules

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Dear Fernando!

First of all, thank you very much for this wonderful thread and your forum in general! I've just registered and about to start exploring your forum for top-notch quality info just like in this thread :)

I've always taken my time picking and installing latest/best drivers for my systems but I've ALWAYS been puzzled by Intel RST drivers, which would often refuse to install on some of my older (and even relatively modern) machines. This thread was absolutely godsend!

Recently I've been searching drivers for my ASUS N56VJ in order to downgrade to Windows 7. When it came to Intel RST, I first checked the ASUS driver download page which had version 11.7.0.1013 listed as the "latest". So I went ahead and downloaded currently latest Intel RST driver (14.8.0.1042) from Intel website. After receiving "This platform is not supported" message I started googling and luckily quickly found this thread. However, it turned out that the chipset in my laptop is kind of "special". In device manager it says Intel(R) 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family, but despite saying "7 Series" I was unable to install driver version 13.1.0.1058 which you recommend for this series. Then I tried your other recommended version 12.9.4.1000 (which is for 5- or 6-Series as I understand) and it installed successfully! Thank you!

I've decided to use software version because I like its neatness and don't think my laptop will slow down by much since I am running Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB.

I've also noticed you have modded versions of Intel RST drivers. Would there be any reason for me to try any of them? As far as I understood the performance difference is quite marginal. Thanks in advance!

Hello fernando,
your forum and the informations from you are really stellar. I developed a method to fasten pcs beyond their limits (see signature) and the final icing on the cake would be the usage and integration of the best Intel AHCI drivers.

I would like to test your different mods on all my test machines with different benchmarks - here the chipsets:

A Lenovo T61 ICH8M-E
B Dell Inspiron ICH9M
C Nvidia GF 9100M

I want to avoid unnecessary tests, so I thought to do the following:

You say, your favorite sequence is 11 - 12 - 13 - 14

So I would test in this order:

Original PC with original settings
your 11 mod without my method (your favorite)
your 12 mod without my method (maybe worse)
your 14 mod without my method (probably the worst)

the same again with my method

Do you have any suggestions to improve my order of tests?

Of course, I will send you the result of my investigations.

many friendly greets and my big respect what you have realized here!!! Exemplary!!

Elmar

Thanks back...

Yes, I am interested in mods not running in free wilderlife yet....

I imagine, it could be wise, if you mod god tell me, what to test with the mentioned chipsets. I am the system optimizer, you the chipset optimizer.

What do you think of writing me a short list of drivers to throw in a really hard mud run?

And I promise you, I will make it dirty for them... ;-)

Yes, really dirty.... ;-)

So, what do you want to have tested with the mentioned chipsets?

Elmar