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I have a laptop with Haswell Core i5 and Intel Rapid Storage Technology.

The OS drive is an mSATA Samsung EVO 840. As you may have heard, they had some miscalibration leading to excessive retries and very slow transfer speeds, as data on the drive ages. There's a tool from Samsung for rewriting the data to make it "young" again, and a firmware update that may or may not prevent the problem from recurring.

The drive is configured with Intel Rapid Start and Smart Response Technology (30GB as cache for the 2.5" rotating SATA drive, 220GB for OS), and this uses the "RAID" mode and Intel driver. The Samsung tool cannot communicate with the drive, blaming the Intel drivers. Evidently they don't pass vendor SATA commands through to the drive.

Is there a way to perform the firmware update / data refresh without losing the caching feature? I'm willing to disable acceleration temporarily in order to accomplish this, but AFAIK if I revert the drive to "available" I cannot re-enable caching without wiping the disk and reinstalling the OS. Does someone know otherwise? Is there a workaround? Put the drive in a eSATA dock during update or something like that?

Intel software, performance tab showing system caching

After clicking 'disable acceleration', which is reversible

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  • Seems like the solution is simple. Create a image of the drives, perform the task, then restore those images. You refresh the data, update the firmware, at the cost of a few hours of restoring an image.
    – Ramhound
    Feb 26, 2015 at 3:54
  • @Ramhound yes that should be possible but I would prefer a solution that doesn't require wiping the drive, as I said.
    – Ben Voigt
    Feb 26, 2015 at 4:20
  • How about something like using and msata to sata adapter to connect the drive to a desktop pc and perform the firmware update there
    – Dan
    Feb 26, 2015 at 8:06
  • @Dan: That would be ok, I even suggested as much. But I'd like to know whether the tool would work like that, or the Smart Response Cache structure would confuse it, or connecting to a host controller that doesn't do Smart Response Cache would corrupt it.
    – Ben Voigt
    Feb 26, 2015 at 15:21

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