Windows 7 on a RAID 0 Array

David Cruit

Honorable
Jun 11, 2013
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0
10,510
So, about a week or two ago, I installed Windows 7 on a RAID 0 SSD array. After the pain in the ass installation, Windows 7 insisted that I had disk errors and every time on start up it would force me to run a Disk Check, 37 times to be exact, and the results would com back clean. Finally, after running troubling-ly for two weeks, Windows crapped out on me. It would just refuse to boot. I ended up obtaining a copy of Windows 8 Pro, and it installed perfectly. It recognized the RAID array first thing without me having to install any of the AMD drivers, and ever since It has been working flawlessly. Anybody else have an experience similar to this?

(not needed) System specs
Modified Cougar Evolution case (cut off the top to fit in a 240mm radiator)
AMD FX-8350 @ Stock Clock
Corsair H100i Cooler
Gigabyte 7870 GHz Edition, Core @ 1200MHz, Memory @ 1300MHz
G.Skill 12GB DDR3-1333 (memory clock speeds are overrated)
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Revision 1
2x San Disk Extreme 240GB in a RAID 0 array
2x Samsung HD640JJ, separated, used as storage for Downloads, animations, and Movies
 
IMO, Raid arrays just don't work well when used for the OS. Sure, you can do it, but I just don't trust that kind of setup. If you are looking for speed, look at pci e ssd from Other World Computing. Very fast and will easily boot and run windows. Hopefully someone with some more experience with RAID 0 on the OS will chime in as I am curious to its reliability.
 

David Cruit

Honorable
Jun 11, 2013
14
0
10,510


Actually, my old Dell had the two Samsung Drives in RAID 0 and was running Windows Vista very reliably. Never ran into disk issues, the only time I BSOD'd was when I tried to run AMD Overdrive on an Intel machine (Silly 12/13 year old me). It was when I upgraded to Windows 7 that I lost the array and had to reformat both disks.
 

David Cruit

Honorable
Jun 11, 2013
14
0
10,510


I talked to AMD (Im using the SB950 chipset for the RAID array), it wasn't a driver issue, they said that they have also run into some problems with Windows.