AHCI to RAID???

[zloginet]

Hello everyone... after a 2 month rebuild including a full custom water cooling project and a few other pieces added I am in a bit of a stir. I really want someone to help find the answer cause I am TIRED... lol

I had already SSD and a 1TB backup/steam drive

I now have SSD for boot, 1TB backup (still steam drive), 2x 1TB 1Platter 64mb Seagates that I want to put into RAID 0 for my steam drive...

Currently everything is AHCI

Motherboard is a Crosshair Formula V

Tell me how I go about this without having to loose or redo boot drive...

 

[Dereck47]

Just change your SATA ports to RAID mode.
Any drive connected that is not part of an actual RAID array will automatically default to AHCI mode.

 

[bavman]

If you simply switch to RAID it'll turn AHCI off for all drives that are on the same controller (in case your mobo has 2 controllers for harddrivers). This will cause windows 7 to be unable to boot-up, but you just have to changed 1 thing in the registry before you do it:

http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/165671-enable-disable-ahci.html

It'll turn AHCI off in windows 7 and you'll be able to boot up just fine

Another alternative is to keep AHCI on as it generally gives better performance for your SSD and software raid your 2 drivers using intel rapid storage manager.

Edit: also why do you want to raid0 2 harddrivers? The only thing that will change is that you'll have slightly higher read/write speeds. Other than that, programs won't load faster (since access time is high on harddrives), and if one drive dies you lose all your data from both drives. I recommend you just keep them separate and install files on both of them without any RAID.

 

[Dereck47]

The OP states that the drives are already in AHCI mode. So how does going to RAID mode turn it off?

 

[bavman]

The OP states that the drives are already in AHCI mode. So how does going to RAID mode turn it off?

Because its a choice in bios if you want to perform a hardware raid. You can choose between RAID, IDE (if your mobo has a IDE port), and AHCI in bios generally, so if you choice one the others are not available to you. This is how most controllers work 1 or the other

 

[Dereck47]

Yes, SATA ports have 3 modes, IDE, AHCI, & RAID.
AHCI is a subset of RAID. In other words, RAID has all of functions that AHCI does plus additional functions in order to create a array.

So nothing gets turned off. The boot drive will still be in AHCI mode and no Windows Registry changes are needed.

 

[bavman]

I seem to recall differently when I installed 2 drives in my desktop to put them in RAID 1 for long term storage. I had it original set to AHCI and couldn't boot up anymore after I had raided the drives. Maybe its dependent on chipset, I was doing this with a p55 mobo.

 

[Dereck47]

Maybe its dependent on chipset, I was doing this with a p55 mobo.

Good point; chipset and/or drivers.