Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver stops Autoplay working  

Hello,

I have a problem with Autoplay not working on a DVD drive which I have traced to the installation of the Intel Rapid Storage driver.

This is on a new build computer (Asus Hero VIII) and the driver was installed from the motherboard support DVD.

When the installation of the drivers was started autoplay worked OK when the support DVD was inserted.

After that autoplay would not work.

After a lot of testing I discovered that it was the Intel rapid Storage drivers that were installed from the DVD that caused the problem.

When they were removed autoplay works OK.
When they are re-installed autoplay stops working again.

Question:

What is Intel Rapid Storage drivers used for ?

I have the following drives on my system:-

1. Samsung SM951 M2 AHCI 256GByte drive for Windows 7 Pro 64bit OS
2. SanDisk 256 GByte SSD
3. 2 off 2, TByte Seagate HD's
4. 2 off, Asus DRW-24F1MT DVD Re-writers.

I do not use RAID.

Do I need Intel Rapid Storage installed ?


Regards,

Nick.

Hi Nick,

I know this is a bit old but, I think I have the solution to your problem, I ran into the same scenario yesterday and found a solution. You see you get an icon in your system tray for Intel rapid storage when it is installed.




Double click the icon and it will take you to the Intel rapid storage application. Depending on your version of Intel rapid Storage, the interface may be a bit different. Look for a tab labeled "performance".




This tab lists a feature called link power management which is "enabled" by default. What this does is that it tries to cut out power and put all SATA devices to sleep when they are not in use. When you pop in a disc in you DVD drive, it is most probably in sleep mode and takes some time to get active. In the worst case you have to refresh windows explorer in order to make the drive spin and start reading the contents. This also messes with the Autoplay functionality and you don't get the autoplay pop up.

Simple solution is to to just click on that "Disable" option in the performance tab and then restart your computer. Restart is absolutely important for the changes to work. You will see that the drive will start working normally.

The problem is that most modern laptops and motherboards come with this Intel rapid storage feature. The users just install all the drivers without thinking much. IRST (Intel rapid storage) also gets installed and starts messing with autoplay because for some strange reason intel decided to enable link power management by default in IRST. This only affects SATA DVD drives and not the older drives.

There are still many people around the globe who use DVD drives and run into this autoplay problem. Wish I could share this with all of them.