HDD/SSD hybrid setup questions

HCHTech

HCHTech

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I've got an Acer M5 481 PT laptop on the bench. It has a 500GB HD, and a separate 20GB SSD card that mounts directly to the motherboard (mSATA). The original customer complaint was excessive slowness. Hardware testing reveals that this SSD has failed. The computer still boots and runs, but it is very slow.

Removing the SSD allows the computer to run more normally, but, I suspect, slower than if the SSD were in place and functional

My question is I'm wondering how / where this SSD is configured. I cannot find anything in the BIOS that addresses the SSD, and I find no Vendor software in Windows that would access / configure the SSD.

Since the computer still boots and runs when the SSD is removed, there must not be anything critical to the OS resident there. Which begs the question - if I replace the SSD, how do I configure things to utilize it?
 
Ahh. Thank you - I think that gives me what I need. I'll dig into it tomorrow to check whether it's the Intel RST. Assuming that all comes together, I"ll order the part and get on with it. You learn something new every day!
 
With the lower prices of SSDs these days it may be simpler (with better performance) to just buy a 120/250/500 GB SSD and run the whole system from SSD, and forget about trying to configure a new 20 GB SSD for caching.

Intel SSD caching sounded interesting at the time, about 3 year ago, but since SSD prices have dropped caching is not really needed.
 
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