Merwinsson schrieb:
Let's say, for example, that you had a clean system booting off a RAID volume, and have just installed RST 12.X, only to discover it has bugs, so you decide to go back to having a clean system (use of the default Windows supplied Intel driver). There appears to be no way to go back. The installer does not remove the driver. Why would it not do this, as there is a default driver to fall back upon.
The "Add/Remove Programs" option is just for software and not for drivers. The RST package installer installs the driver(s) and the software, but the uninstall procedure affects just the RST software. If you want to uninstall a driver, you always have to use the Device Manager. That is good for many users, because the "fall back to iaStorV" mechanism wouldn't work for all Intel RAID systems.
I personally have an Intel Z77 RAID0 system and install the RST software only once, when I do a fresh install of the OS, and use it for just for a few secondes to enable the Write-Back Caching. After having done it, I uninstall the RST software at once and would be very sad, if there would be the need of a reinstallation of the Intel RAID driver, which brings the best performance for my system.
Merwinsson schrieb:
And since you seem to know so much about RST, can you verify my understanding of these device keys.
iaStor Classical pre-11.5 RST driver
iaStorA Newer 11.5+ RST driver (non-filter part)
iaStorF Newer 11.5+ RST driver (filter part)
iaStorV Windows supplied default Intel RAID driver
I have ALL these keys on one of my systems, and I am wondering which are not needed. For instance, since I am using 11.7 on this system, can I delete iaStor and turn iaStorV OFF?
The Win7/8 in-box Intel RAID driver iaStorV is part of the OS and cannot be uninstalled, because it is the generic OS emergency driver for Intel RAID systems. If you have installed at any time a classical Intel RST RAID driver (iaStor) and one of the more actual Intel RST(e) drivers (iaStorA + iaStorF), all these drivers and the related INF files will remain present within the Windows directory of your system drive, but this doesn't mean, that they all are used while you are working with your computer. So there is neither a need nor a reason to uninstall any of the Intel RAID drivers, which are not actually in use, but may be needed, if your system should crash due to a buggy Intel RAID driver version.