Intel RST Warning?

[MentalAcetylide]

I'm wondering what this is. Over the past year, I've been noticing the USB ports on my Alienware17 laptop from 2014 sometimes do not function, and have been hearing 4 distinct clicks(about 4 seconds apart) from the DVD/CD area every time when booting/rebooting the system, and also a few times afterwards. It also occurs whenever I plug an external device into any of the USB ports. Then today when I returned to the laptop after turning on the power and letting it boot up, I noticed an exclamation instead of the green check mark for the Intel RST icon in the tray. So I missed anything else that might have cropped up during the booting process since I went afk for several minutes.
I haven't noticed any issues accessing files or starting programs. Any ideas?

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.40GHz
Total Physical Memory: 16.00 GB
Memory Size: 4.00 GB x4
Memory Type: DDR3 (1600 MHz)
Memory Manufacturer: Hynix

LITEONIT DMT-80 SCSI Disk Device
Model Number: LITEONIT DMT-80
Drive Serial Number: FHC7550854334053
Total Capacity: 10.53 GB
DATAPART1 - D:
Volume Serial Number: A0B5-7A6B
File System: NTFS
Volume Capacity: 10.53 GB
Volume Free Space: 10.44 GB
Volume Used Space: 90.98 MB

WDC WD10JPVX-75 SCSI Disk Device
Model Number: WDC WD10JPVX-75
Drive Serial Number: WX81A24W2372
Total Capacity: 931.51 GB
OS - C:
Volume Serial Number: D6A9-508E
File System: NTFS
Volume Capacity: 919.25 GB
Volume Free Space: 824.44 GB
Volume Used Space: 94.81 GB

Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600
Vendor Name: Intel Corporation
Interface: PCI
Video Card Chip Type: Intel(R) HD Graphics Family
Video Card Memory: 2.06 GB

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M
Vendor Name: NVIDIA Corporation
Video Card Memory: 2.00 GB
Video Card BIOS: 80.06.61.00.01
Video Card Memory: 2.00 GB
Video Card BIOS: 80.06.61.00.01

Motherboard
Manufacturer Alienware
Product 068R5X
Chipset Intel PCH HM87
ePPID CN068R5X12963451002F

I think I'm going to leave it run for now until I figure out how to back stuff up from my render scene files before it dies. I think its reaching the end of its life. I could seriously kick myself in the nuts for not having this RAID 0 crap yanked out and replaced with a true SSD a few years ago... Hindsight is always 20/20 so I guess that makes me a butthead.

 

[newtekie1]

What you had wasn't really RAID0, it's a bit confusing. If you really had RAID0 and had a drive failure, everything would be gone.

What was setup was Intel Smart Response Technology(SRT). This uses up to 64GB of an SSD as a cache for a hard drive to improve the performance of the hard drive. As far as Windows knows, you only have the hard drive. But SRT works in the background to cache frequently used data to improve performance. This helps improve Windows boot times, and application startup times, etc. This is the predecessor to Optane Memory, which is the same technology but allowing you to use use Optane drives to cache any other storage in the computer. RST is limited to only allowing a SATA SSD to cache a SATA HDD. And in your case, the SSD that was being used as a cache has failed. No data is lost when this happens, the RST cache just no longer functions.

 

[MentalAcetylide]

What you had wasn't really RAID0, it's a bit confusing. If you really had RAID0 and had a drive failure, everything would be gone.

What was setup was Intel Smart Response Technology(SRT). This uses up to 64GB of an SSD as a cache for a hard drive to improve the performance of the hard drive. As far as Windows knows, you only have the hard drive. But SRT works in the background to cache frequently used data to improve performance. This helps improve Windows boot times, and application startup times, etc. This is the predecessor to Optane Memory, which is the same technology but allowing you to use use Optane drives to cache any other storage in the computer. RST is limited to only allowing a SATA SSD to cache a SATA HDD. And in your case, the SSD that was being used as a cache has failed. No data is lost when this happens, the RST cache just no longer functions.

Ah ok, so boot times and program startups will be slower. I can live with that. This thing just needs to last another two weeks until I get my new desktop and I can get this ball ache of a laptop to the shop & have this SSD replaced with something much bigger, along with the mechanical hard drive, new thermal paste for the CPU, and whatever else might need to be replaced. I suspect its more of a controller going bad rather than the SSD. The motherboard could be going bad for all I know.

After 8 freakin months of waiting, its going to be nice getting on a truly custom system instead of this Dell crap. Maybe I could instead just have the laptop turned into a VM with Win7 Ultimate minus the Dell garbage.

 

[agent_x007]

If clicking "mark as normal" doesn't work, swap SATA cable (and mark as normal again).
Still doesn't work ?
Your drive is probably gone (or SATA port).

 

[newtekie1]

If clicking "mark as normal" doesn't work, swap SATA cable (and mark as normal again).
Still doesn't work ?
Your drive is probably gone (or SATA port).

I'm pretty sure this is a laptop, so no cable to mess with. It's probably actually a mSATA drive if I had to guess.

You can try marking it a normal and see if that works. I wouldn't really mess with it, in my experience if it is marked failed chances are it will get marked as failed again pretty quickly.

 

[agent_x007]

Yeah, I missed "MQ" CPU part...

 

[MentalAcetylide]

I'm pretty sure this is a laptop, so no cable to mess with. It's probably actually a mSATA drive if I had to guess.

You can try marking it a normal and see if that works. I wouldn't really mess with it, in my experience if it is marked failed chances are it will get marked as failed again pretty quickly.

Nope, I'm not going to mess with it. As a matter of fact, I still haven't shut it down. On the one hand, I fear that this failure would not allow me to boot the laptop again if I shut it down, but does this make any sense? If the failure occurred before booting up, I would say no, but what about afterwards? Yeah, I think you're right in that its an mSATA and that its used as a cache for speeding up boot times and loading programs. I recall seeing "striping" show up when starting the system up before windows starts to load.
I also recall that there's some kind of synchronicity with some setups where swapping out drives isn't just a simple matter of pulling the old drive out & throwing in a new one. For example, Sony PS3's & their DVD/CD drive have this "feature".

 

[newtekie1]

I fear that this failure would not allow me to boot the laptop again if I shut it down, but does this make any sense?

It should not affect the ability to boot.