‘Haswell-E systems suffer from driver problem SATA ports’

Intel’s X99 chipset for the Haswell E platform would suffer from driver problems, which would limit the use of the SATA ports. The problems are said to have arisen after Intel withdrew a special driver for the platform.

Version 4.1.0.1046 of Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology Enterprise can no longer be found in Intel’s driver list, and motherboard manufacturers such as Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI have also retired the driver, Heise noted. Inquiries with Asus revealed that the driver did not provide trim support with raid0, but a new driver version is not planned.

The RSTe driver is for X99 chipsets of the Haswell E platform and for C610 chipsets for Xeon E5 processors, and the software allows the systems to use the ten SATA 600 ports. With the RSTe driver retired, users should turn to RST driver 13.1, ASRock told Heise. That driver is not optimized for the X99 chipset.

However, the RST driver can only address six SATA 600 ports and the other four ports have to do with the standard Windows ahci driver. This means, among other things, that raid setups with up to six drives are possible and that the four remaining ports, for example, do not support SATA link power management. Intel has not yet responded to the reports from the German site.