Saturday, 1 June 2019

hard drive - Properly disabling Intel SRT


I just purchased a Dell XPS 8500 that comes with a 2TB mechanical HDD + 32GB SSD that is configured to use Intel's SRT.


I'm planning to dual boot Win7 and Ubuntu, but it seems like SRT drivers are not available in linux. So I'd like to disable SRT and use the 32GB SSD as a regular disk to have Ubuntu run on it (my priority is to optimize Ubuntu). Additionally I'd like to run Win7 on the 2TB HDD.


I've found plenty resources on how to enable SRT properly but haven't found a in-depth article on disabling it.


Is it as simple as turning the feature off in the SRT UI (in windows) and in the BIOS configuring your HDD to run in AHCI mode rather than SATA0?


Also, is it a good idea to dual boot on 2 separate drives as mentioned above (the 32GB SSD was included as a part of the XPS package so I'd like to use it)?



Answer



In your BIOS you should be able to disable the intel SRT feature. Once you do this, use GParted, to format this drive ( I also had to create a partition table on the drive.) Go ahead and install windows and linux. grub did the rest for me automatically. But first do check that your BIOS can also find the SSD.


If your windows is still not installed then just dont install the driver for SRT. Otherwise I guess you'd have to disable it first. I deleted windows soon after buying the PC so I didn't have to do this.


In any, case I am currently back to the way the laptop was shipped (almost) and looking for ways of trying to cache with ubuntu. If its even possible!


PS: I was first just trying to install with dual boot. I saw that for the ubuntu installer to find the HDD I had to type in dmraid -E -r /dev/sdX with X being the drive. After I did this and rebooted I got a sscreen printing the HDD + SSD RAID(fakeraid) setup and asked to to press Ctrl + i to configure. I went here and this is where I was able to fully disable the SSD caching and use the drive for installing ubuntu.


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