Many of those who bought a Lenovo laptop in the past few months already know that the new Rapid Drive technology is not the most efficient way to manage your storage drives. That’s why I’m going to do a brief explanation on what you should do in order to install the operating system on you SSD, and use your HDD for backup and store data.

First of all, a Rapid Drive is a technology which will combine your HDD and SSD into one drive in order to improve speeds of access and transfer rates. As SSD drives are quite expensive, most users cannot afford to use them for storage purposes, therefore, the RapidDrive will give an average speed on the SSD and HDD combined drive and the storage capacity of the HDD.

Now, there are a lot of incompatible software, one of which is Microsoft Windows 8. Others are disk managers, partition managers or antivirus which will give a BSOD because they cannot recognize the nature of the storage drives.

In order to install Microsoft’s latest operating system, users must wait for a new release or they could go for the classic storage system, leaving Rapid Drive aside.

There are several steps to break down the RapidDrive mount:

- backup all of your data on an external drive, because you will rewrite the partition table

- try to create backup of Lenovo’s recovery partition

- write a MBR on your SSD

Hence the SSD exists physically and it is connected to the msata, your BIOS will see it as an independent drive. Therefore, to write a MBR on it, you could use Gparted or any other linux based disk management tool. What I can recommend is for you to create a USB Installation Disk for Ubuntu 10.10 or later and use the live edition option.

- partition your hard drives separately

Here you should let the SSD with only one primary partition for your operating system and try to partition the HDD with more than 2 (one for your work in progress like downloads, larger or additional programs and one for backup and data storage).

- install windows normally

After you completed the steps above, you will notice an improvement regarding the boot time, file access. Still, when writing on your C drive (which is now the SSD), you will notice a bit of lag. This happens because Lenovo wanted to use the SSD for caching purposes and the included drive has poor writing speed. Accessing the operating system and program files will be a lot faster thanks to the reading capabilities and access timing on the SSD.