A friend of mine asked me to help him with the re-installation of his Asus S56C ultrabook. This machine, has a 24 GB SSD that can be used as cache for your operating system, this will increase the speed and overall performance of it.

Note: This guide, might apply not only for Asus, but Lenovo and other brands that also use Express Cache software.

So I installed Windows 7 with his USB drive and after everything was installed (drivers, apps, etc.) the SSD was not being used at all. I downloaded from Asus website the Express Cache application  from Condusiv Technologies, but I didn’t know how to check if the application was actually using the SSD or not, as it doesn’t have a graphical interface.

So, once Express Cache is installed, just follow this simple steps:

1) Make sure you have Intel Rapid Storage driver installed.

2) Make sure you see the SSD disk within the Windows Disk Manager (Right click on computer > Manage > Disk Management). Or you can go to Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc.

3) Delete any partitions you see on the SSD and do not create any other. Warning, when you delete a partition from a hard drive, every information saved on the drive will be lost, so if you have something stored there, make sure to make a backup first. You will also need to take note of the partition number, usually the main (bigger) drive on the PC is “Disk 0” and the SSD is “Disk 1” but make sure to check if this applies for you too.

4) Open a command prompt as an administrator (Start > Accesories > Right clik on Command Prompt > Run as an Administrator) and go to the folder where the Express Cache application was installed, in my case: C:\Program Files (x86)\Condusiv Technologies\Express Cache\.

5) On the elevated command prompt type: “eccmd.exe -info” and you will see if the SSD disk is in use or not. In my case the message was something like “No HFS Partition detected”.

6) If this is the case, go to Start > Run > Services.msc and stop the Express Cache service.

7) Now go back to the command prompt and lets create a partition on the SSD, you will need to type: “eccmd -partition [diskID] [size]” (for me: eccmd -partition 1 24GB).

8) Then you can go and start the Express Cache service again.

9) Go back to the Command Prompt screen and type again: “eccmd.exe -info” to check if now you are being able to see the SSD in use.