Inspiron and The Mysterious Shrinking SSD Drive - help?

I have an Inspiron 7520 with a 1TB hard drive and a 32gb msata drive. I've been using Intel's RST to accelerate the system, which definitely has sped up boot time.

However, a problem arose today.

After booting up, I got an error message from the RST icon in the task bar. This has happened on a few occasions. For no apparent reason, random errors arise. I've always been able to fix it by disabling acceleration, then re-enabling.

I disabled acceleration. I re-enabled it. The whole laptop froze. Eventually, I shut the system down and re-started.

Now there's a problem. According to Intel RST (and Speccy), my 32gb msata drive is now only 1gb. Also, acceleration is no longer an option within RST.

I've tried uninstalling the drive in Windows control panel & re-installing it, and also tried changing the drivers to AHCI. No luck. Is there a software fix for this, or is this an indication that my msata drive has somehow fried? I'm tempted to try physically removing the drive & plugging it back in, just for giggles, but that looks to be a huge PITA that would take hours.

 

Definitely try reseating it if you can, but I would suspect that the mSATA drive has indeed gone kaput.

 

I tried running the Dell pre-boot diagnostics, which failed to detect the drive at all. Ah, well. I believe it's fried. I think I'll replace it with a larger one and use it as my main OS drive.