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RAID help

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EmptySoul

Registered
Joined
Jun 15, 2013
Location
London
Hi hopefully this is in the right place I was unsure to post this here or in storage.

I have the Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z and need help setting up a RAID.

I am running windows 8.1

I have two 250GB SSD's and 3 HDD of different sizes.

I want the two SSD's to run in RAID 0 and have the 3 HDD's just normal partitions.

I have tried looking and can't find out how to set it up.. If I change the settings to RAID in my bios the computer fails to start.

If someone could walk me through it :)

I've added screen shots of the bios.


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Well;, unless you do a lot of sequential writes, SSD-s in RAID 0 is useless really....
The 4K read speeds is where you see the improvements in the OS load times and such. RAID won't help those.

But by the looks of things, you need the drive you want to RAID in the correct ports.
Looks like in your case ports 1-4.
The AMD boys can help, I'm just an Intel user, so I'm used to Intel's RST, which is different than what you have. :)
 
If the operating system is on one of those solid state drives, you are going to have a lot more work to do. Simply putting them in RAID will initialize them, which wipes the drives.

Not to mention, you aren't going to gain anything performance wise (short of pure sequential throughput, which I really doubt you'd notice). It isn't worth the headache to setup. Get a larger drive if you need the space.
 
It was more for the learning curve than the actual practicality.. it would make more sense performance wise to do it with the HDDs but I do not want to loose the data on those... as for wiping the OS that's really not a problem as Windows 8.1 has been stupidly buggy for me and so planning on going back to windows 7 anyway. I would reinstall 7 as I did this
 
What issues do you have with 8.1? I use this on my desktop and laptop and don't have any problems.
 
Well the motherboard came as Windows 8 ready and came with kapersky anti virus. The anti virus won't perfume a scan it keeps encountering a problem and shutting down. Web pages in chrome get an error and need to be refreshed. HWMonitor will only start 1 in 3 or 4 times it usually gets a run error. And I sometimes get a your computer has experienced a problem and needs to be restarted and it automatically restarts. I've had 8.1 for 2 days. It was fine yesterday but today it's just refusing to work... also u torrent is using 14% of my CPU. .. which never happened on windows 7. BUT it's not a legal copy of windows 8.1 so it could be that..
 
Well the motherboard came as Windows 8 ready and came with kapersky anti virus. The anti virus won't perfume a scan it keeps encountering a problem and shutting down. Web pages in chrome get an error and need to be refreshed. HWMonitor will only start 1 in 3 or 4 times it usually gets a run error. And I sometimes get a your computer has experienced a problem and needs to be restarted and it automatically restarts. I've had 8.1 for 2 days. It was fine yesterday but today it's just refusing to work... also u torrent is using 14% of my CPU. .. which never happened on windows 7. BUT it's not a legal copy of windows 8.1 so it could be that..

Oooo... :-/

That could be a cause yes.
 
I'd start by getting a legal copy of the operating system and doing a clean install. The OS works fine.
 
+1 to that lol
Why would someone release an os that's not legit?
Because of the exploites they put in the code... No telling what you're pc gets upto and I promise it won't be safe :thup:
 
It was purely to test it lol windows 8 was horrible and didn't wanna fork out for 8.1 if it was gonna be just as bad... anyway so ill be going back to 7 and how would I sort out the RAID???
 
It was probably bad because you didn't have a legit version.

Before you switch over the drives, you will want to make sure you have the RAID drivers on a flash drive in case Windows 7 doesn't have them. Get them from the motherboard manufacturer's site. Make sure you have the drivers not the driver install on the flash drive.

If you don't care about the data on the disks, the setup is easy. Enable RAID in the BIOS, use the key combination to get into the RAID configuration after POST; CTRL + I for Intel is the only onboard one I know offhand. In this configuration, create a RAID 0 partition, select your two drives, and follow the prompts. Pop in your Windows 7 disk and restart. If it sees your disk, great: easy install! If it doesn't see the disk, tell it to load the drivers from your flash drive and install like normal.
 
To pick up on what Thideras said, one step those new to RAID building often overlook is the actual selecting of the drives that will go into the RAID. After you declare the RAID configuration (in your case, RAID 0) you need to go into the RAID setup utility as Thideras said by pressing Ctrl + some other key (watch the post messages as that key combo info will be presented) and then select each drive you want in the RAID.

Although there isn't much performance to be gained by putting two SSDs in RAID 0 it is, however, a cheap way to double the capacity of the system disc when you want storage to be handled by the system disc instead of having two discs, one for system files and the other for mass storage. This is what I have done and I have had "0" problems with two SSDs being in RAID 0 for almost a year now. Of course, my two drives are identical and that is always best in RAID 0.
 
There is plenty of performance to gain, on paper, to R0 SSD's (on the order fo 2x)... its the user using it that may not see much gain (assuming that is what you meant from what was written - just wanted to make it clear) since they may not work with large enough files to actually 'see' or 'feel' a difference.
 
Just a few things to add. The Raid0 must be on the first and second sata ports in order that it will boot to windows. If you already have an install you want to use, you can install the raid drivers and backup the install to another drive(you will have to use a backup software that will work in prewindows, ie before windows boot, usually by USB or CD.). Remove the backup drive and create the array. You will have to reboot several times, like create raid, enable in bios, enable raid in bios, chose boot drive in bios, well you get it. Always disconnect any drive that you are not going to raid, so there is no chance of writing over any other data. Most backup software does not care weather a drive is raid or singular, it only sees them as drives, so imaging from a single drive to raid is very simple.
Also AMD raid is much more resilient than Intel and it is unlikely that you will ever lose data unless a drive goes down.
 
:shrug: RAID is RAID. Drive dies, you loose RAID array if it's RAID0.

I attempted to boot off of half my RAID0 array... 4 times.
I didn't realize my SATA plug was knocked out of the drive... :eek:

Plugged it back in and the RAID array works great! :thup:
So there isn't really anything different from Intel vs AMD. It's all the same. Just a different name brand slapped on it ;)
 
Why is AMD Raid 0 better.

I cannot say for sure why but perhaps it's because it depends more on software. Other than that , what I can say is that back when I was more involved here, storage was where I hung out more. I read thousands of post on raid and noticed that Intel raid had a lot more data loss that was unexplainable. Disks just drop from array's and the array cannot be fixed, only rebuilt. I started with raid on KT7A-raid mobo and moved the same array many times from mobo to mobo and it never broke, I only moved on from raid after getting an SSD.
 
:shrug: RAID is RAID.
Sorry, but no, that is flat out wrong. What you are telling me is that on board or those super cheap crappy "RAID" cards are just as good as a LSI MegaRAID or whatever the other companies have. That isn't even a comparison. Cheap cards and on board are garbage tier RAID controllers.

I have no experience with AMD RAID, but I'm guessing it is similar to Intel RAID: poor.
 
I have not seen any "onboard" raid that was little more than software raid with the cpu doing the heavy lifting since the majority of onboard raid has no processor, nor dedicated ram, nor power backup. I have seen a few server motherboards that claim to have an onboard raid chip and that might be a litle better than AMD or Intel onboard raid. Maybe. But otherwise onboard raid for DIY mobos is just about nothing more than software raid.

I used raid on plattered drives for years, but now that most of my rigs sport SSDs the raid has gone the way of the DoDo for me. Not worth the hassle.
RGone...
 
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