Raid without AHCI

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Sabertooth990FX

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Sep 1, 2014
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Ok, bear with me on this one. It’s been a long winding road to get here and sadly it’s almost all relevant.

My system is:
Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 motherboard
AMD FX-9370 CPU
XFX R9-270x-cdfc graphics card.
1 SSDD
2 Hard drives in Raid 1
Windows Vista

I like my OS on an SSDD for performance but I have critical data that needs to be secure so I also have the two drives in Raid 1. In order to get windows to see the raid drives, I had to install the AHCI drivers that came with my motherboard. However I have since learned that the graphics card has a known bug that makes it incompatible with the AHCI drivers. I have tried all the work-arounds to get the video card working and it’s just not happening. So my question is this, how can I get Vista to see the RAID without installing AHCI? (Alternatively, if you know how to make the vid card play nice with AHCI, that would work too but I’ve tried updating drivers, uninstalling and all the other popular suggestions)

I have searched the forums and the web for something like this and found many articles on installing AHCI but not removing it while still allowing Raid.
 
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Phillip Corcoran

Phillip Corcoran

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Sep 7, 2013
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Why not do regular manual backups to a couple of drives without using a RAID setup? It's served me well for the past 20 years without the inherent risks that RAID introduces.

Of course I'm only suggesting manual backups as an alternative just to get around your current "bug" issue, not suggesting that RAID doesn't have any merit in itself.
 
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ronintexas

ronintexas

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Dec 10, 2012
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Synchback free: http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

This program allows you to synchronize two hard drives real-time or do a nightly backup. RAID is not a replacement for backup - if you lose one drive, you must replace that drive and rebuild the RAID array.

In a business production environment, RAID is a big necessity, as you have to have 100% uptime, and generally the cost of having employees sit idly by while you repair a server is not a consideration compared to the cost of hard drives and RAID arrays. In these environments, they are not using the software or mobo RAID, they buy costly RAID adapters, and have multiple drives as spares. Typically the costs are 3-5 times the cost of single drives....but employees sitting around not working cost more.

For home....I will always suggest using synchback free.....less costly and when one drive dies, you simply switch to the other drive and you are online and going. You replace the bad drive (with any size drive - RAID requires same size), and the synch starts happening.
 
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Delroy Monjo

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Oct 10, 2013
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I'm not sure why you would RAID 1 a pair of backup drives when they are in the same computer, now you have 3 drives all with the same info on them. In case of a catastrophic failure, fire, flood, direct lightning strike, theft; you have NO backups for your 'sensitive' data....it's ALL gone!
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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Oct 9, 2006
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If I understand correctly, this is not a ssd issue, but a conflict with your graphics card and AHCI.
Normally, ahci is a subset of raid, but that does not seem to be in your case with vista and amd controllers.

Without any extra expense, reconsider you approach to protecting your critical data.
The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years. SSD's are similar.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware,raid controller failure fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, and can tolerate some recovery time, you do not need raid-1
 
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Sabertooth990FX

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To answer your questions on my choice of Raid: I do have back-ups. And I have back-ups of those back-ups. Burned CDs. USB drives, Off-site personal NAS/Cloud, contractual cloud service and non-standard web based storage. (Can you say overkill?) The problem with all of those is time. I process a lot of data when I’m working and the loss of even a few hours of work can be crippling. Further complicating the matter is that the data I’m processing is not something that can be fixed or retrieved. It’s being created at that time. Therefore there are no other copies somewhere. If it’s lost, it’s lost forever. It would have to be re-created which will never be the same as the original. I would (and have) rather spend 2 days getting the original back then 2 hours attempting to recreate it from my buggy memory.

The contractual cloud service is the fastest; backing things up in probably 20 minutes at most. But it’s flighty. I frequently get errors saying there was a problem. Sometimes those errors pop up the next day which means I’ve been without a backup for 12 or more hours. On a good day of work, a 12 hour loss would be bad in ways I would struggle to describe without profanity. USB and NAS are the second best but when I get in a groove, it’s sometimes difficult to remember to copy the files over. It could take a couple hours for me to realize I haven’t looked up from the keyboard. So as best as I can tell, a hard drive failure, which I have been bitten by on a few occasions, and a system crash in between saves are my weakest link. (and I’m fairly OCD about saving)

That being said, that SyncBack sofware that ronintexas mentioned looks promising. I’ll certainly look into that. Though I’m still hoping somebody knows a fix for my issue. :)
 
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Sabertooth990FX

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I was hoping to fix this without buying more hardware. Although it's starting to look like that is my only choice. In my attempts to fix this, I have since taken the drives out of raid and upgraded to Windows 7. The vid card still doesn't work.
 
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