I recently bought an outlet XPS 18 AIO that arrived from Dell with a generic factory load of Windows 8. The 32gb SSD was also formatted as a regular NTFS drive and appeared in Explorer as just another drive (D to be exact). I knew from working with my Inspiron 15z ultrabook (that has the exact same hardware specs of 8gb of memory and 32gb mSATA SSD) that this wasn't right. The system also ran exceptionally slower than my laptop so I knew it wasn't right. After reading THIS thread ad nauseum as well as many others on the webs, I was able to put together a process that works for me every time in setting up the 32gb SSD and getting the Intel Rapid Start/Storage working as it should after a factory reset (which does NOT recreate the correct configuration for the cache drive) or in the event that the SSD failed and needed to be replaced. I spent hours on the phone with Dell support and never got it resolved.
The following steps are what I did to get it working correctly. Please note that some of the things I do here directly conflict with what some of the techs on here have posted so proceed as you deem necessary. But just know that unless I did these steps exactly, I never could get everything setup right to mirror my laptop's settings and get everything working as it should.
These steps also assume you have used a Command Prompt previously. I also downloaded specific versions of the Intel software from the Intel website to match my laptop instead of using what was available for my system from Dell, which by the way was much older versions of the software.
1. Remove all partitions from SSD cache drive using whatever utility you wish. I used Windows disk management. DO NOT RECREATE any partitions on the 32GB SSD drive with Windows Disk Management or Diskpart at this point or this won't work. I did NOT need to disable any settings in the BIOS either. All Intel, UEFI, safeboot, etc. related settings in BIOS were enabled while I was setting this up. My system was completely default settings in the BIOS. ALSO uninstall ALL Intel Rapid Technology software you may already have installed on the system prior to proceeding. Reboot after any uninstalls to make sure everything is cleaned up.
2. Open a Command Prompt window - CMD
3. Enter "Diskpart" (need to use this to use parameters when creating hibernation partition)
4. In Diskpart: (In this example my 32GB SSD drive was disk 1. Yours may vary)
list disk
select disk 1 (SSD drive)
list partition (there should be none)
create partition primary size 8192 set id=84 override (I only have 8GB of system memory)
exit
In Windows Disk Manager, you should now see a 8GB "hibernation" partition with the rest of the drive unformatted AND NO DRIVE LETTER ASSIGNED.
5. Reboot (CRITICAL or you get the dreaded This system is not compatible with this......... when you try to install the Intel software)
6. Install Intel Rapid Start Software FIRST (I used version 3.0.0.1053 straight from Intel)
After Install, open the program and make sure everything is "on" and the timer slider at the bottom is set to "0"
7. Reboot
8. Install Intel Rapid Storage Software (I used version 12.8.0.1016 straight from Intel)
9. Reboot.
10. Open the Rapid Storage software, and "Enable Acceleration"
Choose "Entire Drive" instead of custom or 18.6. When I selected 18.6 or tried to enter 8192 in the custom field, it never worked right.
The software should now create two raid 0 partitions of 8 and 22 GB. Per Dell specs on my laptop that also has this technology, I renamed the 8GB Raid 0 partition "FFS" and the 22GB partition "Dev_Cache".
9. Reboot
At this point, everything was working as expected. If you open Windows Disk Manager, you should no longer see the mSATA SSD drive. After using the system for a few minutes and then rebooting once more, the XPS 18 was at least as fast as my laptop and everything works as expected.
HTH