Intel RST

Potential-Monke

So i've been googling but having no joy with trying to figure this out. For the last few months, i've an icon on the bottom right with what looks like a hard drive with a blue pulsing circle. Mousing over tells me that the "Intel RST Service is not running".

I've 3 drives in the PC, a 128gb SSD as the boot, a 1TB WD Cavier Blue for programs/games, etc, and another 1TB HDD (which came out of an external HDD) for movies.

I'm wondering, do i need this "service"? Can i get rid of it? Because i'm fairly certain it's causing the PC to start up slightly slower, and it's definitely causing it to take about a minute to shut down (whereas start-up and shut-down used to take seconds).

Cheers in advance!

Wetbench4

AFAIK its for setting up harddrives in RAID, so if you don't use you're drives in RAID you can get rid of it.

Edit: Just reading a bit more into it and Intel claim performance increases even when not using RAID so the choice is yours. ---> http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-020784.htm

If your having problems it might be worth uninstalling & re-installing fresh drivers ---> https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=24293&lang=eng

Potential-Monke

Don't know how to use RAID, so i'm taking for granted that i'm not using it. I tried uninstalling it (Googled and used a Microsoft article to uninstall it) but it's still there! Think i might get onto Intel themselves. It's starting to really bug me. Prior to the issues, my CPU usage was idle from 0% to 2%, now it spikes up to 28% when idle, but seems to hand in around 25% before dropping back to 0% for a half a second and back up to 25%.

I also attempted to update the drivers, but in my limited experience with this, the files download but i've no idea what to do with them! Any other drivers i've downloaded install automatically, or there's a .exe for the install, this update just has the following in a RAR folder:

iaahcic.cat
iaAHCIC.inf
iaStorA.sys
iastorac.cat
iaStorAC.inf
iaStorF.sys

What do i do with them?

Cheers for the help.

Edit: Just popped this up on the Intel discussion area, see if i can get anything from them.

ressem

Intel RST have had problems in the past with Intel RST IAStorDataMgrSvc.exe service chewing up CPU and turning the computer's performance to muck, causing Microsoft Update and other microsoft internal databases to fail.

There's 3 parts to it, the driver, the RST service, the RST console.
The driver is essential,
The other 2 are more trouble than they are worth, but are not essential in new versions of RST. The service is supposed to do cacheing, but on my own laptop the version installed by default ate up 1.8GB of RAM and wouldn't release it.

Version 11.5 and 12.6 were often found on struggling machines. And the .Net 3 dependency created pain-in-the-neck chicken and egg scenarios.

But uninstalling can cause windows boot to bluescreen, and require repairing using a windows DVD.
So make sure that you have a suitable DVD before starting to muck with this.


You should be able to add the driver contained within the RAR by opening up "device manager" (in windows 8, right click in the bottom left corner, to bring it up in the menu)

Under Ide ATA/ATAPI Controllers, there should be an Intel controller listed.
Right click and you'll have the option of a driver update, you should be able to choose IaStor out of the extracted RAR folder (iastora.sys is the driver file)
Driver version 12.8.2.1000 seems to work ok.

Potential-Monke

I took the chance and uninstalled it completely (from control panel). Everything still seems to be working perfect, and my CPU idle has gone from 24% to 0%, and i've spared up 0.2GB RAM too. Needless to say, i won't be installing it again.

Cheers for the help folks!