HP notebook SSD drive appears NOT to be used under Windows 10

[dnorcott]

I have a 3.8GB LITEONIT LMS-24 SSD which appears to be completly unused (OS on HD + no drive letter assinged) since upgrading to Windows 10.  

Can anyone advise me as to options for usage.

Will upgrading SSD to 256gb allow installing of OS on this drive or is there some other restriction prventing it being used like a normal drive.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

It is a 24 gig mSATA mSSD and is only useful as an acceleration cache disk. Try launching Intel Rapid Storage Technology from the search field in the lower left of Windows 10. 

If you are showing a 3.8 gig partition in Disk Management it is because the IRST only used a bit over 20 gigs for the acceleration cache which is the default. The rest is available as a Windows partition and can be formatted and assigned a drive letter (not much point since it is so small). The part being used as cache is fused tot he main drive as a kind of RAID array so ceases to be a separate identifiable partition. 

You can install a larger mSATA in the slot but to use it as a bootdisk it has to be the only storage in the machine. And the mSATA mSSD is no faster than a 2.5 inch SATA SSD and the latter are much more plentiful and cheaper per gig. 

The acceleration cache thing was kind of an evolutionary dead end for the SATA bus but has made a reappearance as Optane using the PCIe/NVME interface and Optane works much better than the acceleration as used on your machine (SATA based). 

I know this is complicated and that is one of the reasons this technology was a dead end ultimately. Post back with further questions. 

[dnorcott]

Making sense of what you told me.   Could not run IRST from search box, had to find executable.

As you said IRST reports my SSD as 22mb. 

Even though everything appears to be working normal it also reports my SATA drive as failing.

Both drives are set to Enable write caching.

The Cache volume advanced reports cache mode as off? but status normal.

The SATA  volume advanced reports cache enabled         ? but status Failed "mark as normal"

Hit mark as normal recive  "At risk SMART event"

Diagnostic now reported failed short DST,  I understand this to mean I will loose my HD shortly.  Any other possible interpretation?

[Huffer]

No you have read it correctly