Intel® Optane™ Memory
Support for Issues Related to Intel® Optane™ Memory
Announcements
Want to learn how Intel® Optane™ Memory can help your business? Talk to our Expert!

Looking for our RealSense Community? Click HERE

The Intel® SSD Toolbox and Intel® Data Center Tool are now End-Of-Life, see for more information and replacements tools here
1343 Discussions

Intel Optane, windows 10 and disabling CSM

AKohl6
Beginner
3,382 Views

Good afternoon,

I have been going round and round with my computer for about a week now and have been having limited success getting my optane drive to work as I understand it is supposed to.

I am running an Intel i9 7900 x on an ASUS Strix ROG x299 e-gaming MB with a 1tb HP EX920 m.2 NVMe as a primary disk and a Micron 1100 MTFDAK2T0TBN SATA SSD as a secondary.

 

My goal was to have the Optane memory cache for the micron SATA SSD to improve it's performance to something close to my NVMe drive. The 1TB NVMe and Sata SSD are new drives that i just installed upgrading a previous raid 1 of two platter drives and a 950 samsung pro NVMe m.2.

According to the Optane instructions i must enable Intel RST and disable legacy CSM support. Prior to installing the new drives I was able to get windows to boot with CSM disabled and RST active in the bios and the optane program recognized the installed 32gb Optane m.2 drive, however, the program would not allow the module to cache for the raid 1 array as it was not a compatible drive. now that I've migraded to the new disks, I can enable RST, but if i disable CSM windows will not boot and i've been unable to even boot to a recovery disk unless CSM is enabled again. I have made sure that a EFI folder exists and the drives are infact GPT but i'm at a loss. I figured my ace in the hole was to just re-install windows - but i can't even do that with csm off.

any ideas?

Anthony

0 Kudos
3 Replies
idata
Employee
1,731 Views

Hi dwarfcow,

 

 

Thank you for posting in the Intel® communities.

 

 

Could you please confirm if you are trying to accelerate a RAID 1 array or just a secondary drive? I'm a little bit confused about this.

 

 

On the other hand, could you please download the Intel® System Support Utility (SSU) from the following site and run the full report to collect your system information? The tool can be downloaded from this site: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25293/Intel-System-Support-Utility-for-Windows-. Please attach the report file in your response.

 

 

Please also take a screenshot of the following information:

 

  1. Open your Command Prompt as Administrator.
  2. Run the command Diskpart.
  3. Run the command list disk. Please take a screenshot of the output and include it in your response too.

 

I'll be waiting for your response.

 

 

Have a nice day.

 

 

Regards,

 

Diego V.
0 Kudos
AKohl6
Beginner
1,731 Views

I was trying to accelerate a stand alone SATA SSD that is being used as a secondary storage drive and run windows, unaccelerated off a 2nd m.2 NVMe drive.

I eventually found a solution which identified the actual problem I was having. My motherboard has two M.2 slots (M.2_1 and M.2_2) both slots support Optane acceleration, but because I was trying to use 1 M.2 as a GPT boot drive rather than a separate SATA device it was being rendered inoperable during the Optane setup processes.

What appears to have been happening was that when I was enabling RST Premium and (unintentionally) M.2 Raid support for both M.2 devices the GPT functionally was lost. By enabling CSM it was ignoring the M.2 RAID support and allowing it to boot. The solution was ensuring the M.2 Raid support was enabled on the M.2 slot with the Optane card and not on the NVMe with windows installed on it, or the target of an installation. It was further obfuscated by the Optane Memory Setup program, which, after running initially it "Changes Bios Settings" to make the chip active, and rather than just enabling RST and the M.2 RAID for the Optane card, it arbitrarily enabled RAID it on both slots which returned me to a non-bootable scenario where the GPT was not addressable. The software is obviously not programmed with multiple M.2 slots in mind especially when one is intended as a primary boot partition.

I published a PSA about it on tom's hardware :

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3800066/setting-intel-optane-multiple-slots.html Setting up Intel Optane with Multiple M.2 Slots - Systems

0 Kudos
idata
Employee
1,731 Views

Hi dwarfcow,

 

 

That's great! Thanks for sharing the solution in the community.

 

 

Regards,

 

Diego V.
0 Kudos
Reply