I see this being posted quite a bit in other topics especially in regards to NVMe drive usage. Where sometimes the M.2 drive is or is not recognized by the Windows installer. Some suggest that if one is installed using an 11th, 12 or 13th gen Intel processor you might need it. Me personally I've never had any issues with this. However when I first began noticing it being posted over and over I decided to try myself.
I have a spare 11th gen system up and running. So I pulled both NVMe drives currently installed and installed a clean, unformatted drive in the primary M.2 slot. I took a freshly created flash drive using Media Creation Tool for Win11 and installed the OS....clean. All installed without any issues. No need for IRST drivers. This is on an Asus Z590 motherboard which shows Native MVMe driver support. I have a 13th gen system using a Z790 board I will have to experiment with.
Anyway from what I can gather doing Google searches IRST is not really needed unless one is using RAID on the motherboard. There is another possibility of something called Intel VMD. But again it seems that is more designed for RAID and/or Xeon processors like you might see in Server environments. I see my 13th gen system does have a UEFI setting for VMD which I can enable or disable. It is on by default but the system is still using the default MS NVMe drivers. The 11th gen system tested above does not have a UEFI setting for VMD.
The other hardware that does seem to require the IRST drives is if using Optane, which is now basically stopped being supported. For @cereberus
It also seems some venders, Dell, seem to use default settings in their UEFI that seems to suggest you have to use the IRST drivers. But there also might be a setting to turn that option off or disable. ????
I found this comment from a post on Anandtech forums from Sept of 2022 discussing Intel VMD....
"Prior to Tiger Lake (IIRC), Intel implemented NVMe RAID and SSD caching (Optane Memory) using a weird feature of the PCH to hide NVMe drives from the regular PCIe system and make them only accessible through the SATA controller, so that only Intel's RST drivers would be able to find the NVMe drives. OEMs were encouraged to have this functionality enabled by default, and it was sure to be on by default for any model where Optane Memory was one of the available storage options.
When Intel started providing PCIe lanes for NVMe drives direct from the CPU rather than through the PCH, they needed a different method to ensure that regular NVMe driver software couldn't find and claim the drives before Intel RST did. That's why they brought VMD to the consumer CPUs (no, there weren't any plans to start offering hot-swappable NVMe drives in laptops). It had the nice side effect of meaning that Intel's storage hacks for the sake of RST no longer caused problems for Linux users, because VMD was already well-documented and fully supported by Linux, quite the opposite to Intel's prior PCH-based strategy.
Now that Optane Memory is dead, Intel sold their SSD business, and DirectStorage is forcing everyone to stick with the regular Microsoft NVMe drivers, these shenanigans should be gone for good."
There are some topics discussed on the 11 Forums talking more about Intel VMD.
Anyway my experience is the typical home user NOT using motherboard RAID does not need IRST drivers except for the rare instances one is also using Optane(unfortunately) and those whom might be restricted due to Bios/UEFI settings.
I have a spare 11th gen system up and running. So I pulled both NVMe drives currently installed and installed a clean, unformatted drive in the primary M.2 slot. I took a freshly created flash drive using Media Creation Tool for Win11 and installed the OS....clean. All installed without any issues. No need for IRST drivers. This is on an Asus Z590 motherboard which shows Native MVMe driver support. I have a 13th gen system using a Z790 board I will have to experiment with.
Anyway from what I can gather doing Google searches IRST is not really needed unless one is using RAID on the motherboard. There is another possibility of something called Intel VMD. But again it seems that is more designed for RAID and/or Xeon processors like you might see in Server environments. I see my 13th gen system does have a UEFI setting for VMD which I can enable or disable. It is on by default but the system is still using the default MS NVMe drivers. The 11th gen system tested above does not have a UEFI setting for VMD.
The other hardware that does seem to require the IRST drives is if using Optane, which is now basically stopped being supported. For @cereberus
It also seems some venders, Dell, seem to use default settings in their UEFI that seems to suggest you have to use the IRST drivers. But there also might be a setting to turn that option off or disable. ????
I found this comment from a post on Anandtech forums from Sept of 2022 discussing Intel VMD....
"Prior to Tiger Lake (IIRC), Intel implemented NVMe RAID and SSD caching (Optane Memory) using a weird feature of the PCH to hide NVMe drives from the regular PCIe system and make them only accessible through the SATA controller, so that only Intel's RST drivers would be able to find the NVMe drives. OEMs were encouraged to have this functionality enabled by default, and it was sure to be on by default for any model where Optane Memory was one of the available storage options.
When Intel started providing PCIe lanes for NVMe drives direct from the CPU rather than through the PCH, they needed a different method to ensure that regular NVMe driver software couldn't find and claim the drives before Intel RST did. That's why they brought VMD to the consumer CPUs (no, there weren't any plans to start offering hot-swappable NVMe drives in laptops). It had the nice side effect of meaning that Intel's storage hacks for the sake of RST no longer caused problems for Linux users, because VMD was already well-documented and fully supported by Linux, quite the opposite to Intel's prior PCH-based strategy.
Now that Optane Memory is dead, Intel sold their SSD business, and DirectStorage is forcing everyone to stick with the regular Microsoft NVMe drivers, these shenanigans should be gone for good."
There are some topics discussed on the 11 Forums talking more about Intel VMD.
Anyway my experience is the typical home user NOT using motherboard RAID does not need IRST drivers except for the rare instances one is also using Optane(unfortunately) and those whom might be restricted due to Bios/UEFI settings.
My Computer
System One
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- I'm a computer enthusiast so have quite a few systems that I run. More like an advanced hobby.
