where is my SSD?

sam1970

My new Dell desktop came with 2 TB hard drive and 32 GB SSD. I ran into troubles with it last week so I phoned dell support who were very helpful. They sent me OS disc and took me through the whole installation process which is now complete. One thing I noted is that my 32gb SSD has disappeared from the list of my drives in my pc view (windows 8.1). I remember the dell agent saying that he will use 18 GB of it for acceleration !!! and that will leave me with 11 GB to use. When I look in the disc management tool I could see the 11 GB drive but it is not showing on my pc view so I cant use it. As I have 2 TB drive it is not that important but I am curious to know what is going on? and what is this acceleration thing he mentioned?

Johnmcl7

It sounds like the SSD is set up for caching - rather than have a very small OS install on the 32GB drive which would be extremely impractical, small SSD's are normally set up to cache the most frequently used data from the main drive. The way this works is that the system appears to only have the hard drive but your most frequently used data is copied to the SSD so that you get the speed advantage of an SSD for much less.

Which PC model is it? You should be able to check the settings for the SSD acceleration/caching in the bios.

John

A.Penny.Saved

It sounds like Intel Smart Response Caching with what works out at about a 30GB SSD drive which should show in Disk Management. There might be an Intel icon in the notification area of the task bar.

It provides speed up of frequently used applications and makes boot times fairly fast but not quite as fast as a bigger SSD with Windows installed on it.

It does as Johnmcl7 suggests and mirrors frequently used applications.

danthemoneysavingman

I suggest you get hold of minitool partition wizard home. When you run this you should see the SSD in the list of attached drives. It may be it doesn't have a drive letter assigned at present, you can fix this easily. Pls advise if you need further help.