New Intel iaStor driver available

Many of you have been “challenged” by this driver: when you import it into the MDT Deployment Workbench, it says that it supports both “x86” and “x64” platforms, when really each download supports one or the other.  With the latest release that Intel made available on their download site (and which should be showing up on other vendor’s sites soon if it hasn’t already), that’s no longer an issue.

I downloaded version 8.9.0.1023 (the “allOS” version) from here.  It’s a full installer, but that worked fine for me since my laptop uses the driver anyway.  When the installer finished, it left the drivers in “C:\Program Files\Intel\Intel Matrix Storage Manager\driver” (x86 version) and “C:\Program Files\Intel\Intel Matrix Storage Manager\driver64” (x64 version).  Importing those into MDT 2010 Deployment Workbench resulted in this:

Notice that each one has the right platform assigned with no manual steps needed by me to fix them.  Also note that MDT 2010 properly determined that these were different drivers even though the INF file and version were the same, because the calculated hash value was different – that’s where the “(1)” suffix came from on the x64 driver names, automatically added for the second driver.  MDT 2008 isn’t quite that smart, so you would need to import each driver directory separately with that version, specifying to import duplicates when you imported the second one.