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I bought a laptop which has a 500gb hard drive, and a small SSD drive for caching (24gb). It runs Windows 7 64-bit.

I would like to format the hard drive and reinstall windows. Should I also format the SSD drive? If yes, how? It doesn't have a letter attached to it.

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  • What brand laptop and hard drive? Is there a separate SSD? You may have an hybrid drive which uses the SSD for caching but not as a separate addressable drive. May 6, 2013 at 14:46
  • @Brad Patton: It is Asus S56C. The hard drive is Hitachi, the SSD is SanDisk. As far as I know the SSD is on the mother board.
    – Bohoo
    May 6, 2013 at 17:00

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Looks like the SSD is a mSATA device that plugs into a PCIe interface on the motherboard. It's there to cache requests to/from the hard drive (similar to a 'hybrid drive')

While there might be a way to format it and assign it a drive letter I would recommend against it. You would be left with a very small SSD drive and slower traditional drive.

Recommend you format and install the OS on to the standard hard drive. After the OS is installed you will probably need to install additional software to enable using the SSD for caching. Contact ASUS support for this.

You can also review this article for more information about SSD caching using Intel chipsets.

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