Intel RST sees raid 0 volume but Windows 7 does not

[Explo]

Hey everyone, here is the story:

I recently got a GA-P67A-UD7 mobo. I have two samsung spinpoint F4 2TB drives plugged into the white Intel Sata 3 ports.

I enter the bios, enable RAID XHD, save n' exit, Intel raid setup bios comes up, I cntrl-I, enter and setup a raid 0 following the gigabyte manual. I name it "The Vault."

Boot to my Windows 7 DVD, do a fresh install to my OCZ Vertex 2, get into Windows, install my motherboard drivers, all that stuff, etc., etc. Everything seems fine.

Then I notice my raid is not showing up under my computer. I open disk management and it is not listed in the top half of the screen with my SSD (the C: drive), instead it is down below, and it is called 'Disk 0,' and has roughly 3.6 TB of unallocated space.

I open Intel RST and there she is, "The Vault," Raid 0 Striped, green checkmarks, seems fine.

It even shows up in the windows device manager, "The Vault."

So, what's going on here? If I right click "Disk 0" in disk management, I get the typical options: create spanned, striped, or mirrored volume, convert to dynamic disk, convert to MBR... but these aren't what I need, are they? Has my raid not already been formatted via the BIOS?

Fact is, if I DO try to create a striped volume or even a spanned one, it doesn't work, because I don't have two hard drives to choose from. It sees only one 3.6TB drive.

Can anyone tell me what is going on? =P

One note, not sure if it's related, in the Intel RST BIOS startup (the screen where you hit cntrl-I), it says AHCI bios not installed.

Thanks a lot, everyone

[flyfisher]

Re: Intel RST sees raid 0 volume but Windows 7 does not

BIOS doesn't format the array, you must do that in windows. You said disk management shows "Disk 0" the 3.6Tb as unallocated. In disk management, if you right click on the unallocated space, not Disk 0, you should see the option to create new partition. Click on that and a wizard will open, just follow the wizard.

[Explo]

Re: Intel RST sees raid 0 volume but Windows 7 does not

Ah! Okay, thank you. Last question, I assume formatting a "simple volume" won't conflict with the raid 0 striping I set up in the BIOS? Also, I have the 'allocation unit size' set to default, does this refer to the stripe size, or is it something different. I have 128K set in the BIOS but that isn't an option here.

[Vinster]

Re: Intel RST sees raid 0 volume but Windows 7 does not

I'd just leave it set to default.

The stripe size set in the bios refers to the size of which the data gets split from one disk to the other, where as the Allocation unit size is a space reservation for windows... Default is 4096 (or 4k), and that is what I recommend.

if a file is 2k then windows will use 4k to store the file. if a file is 10k-11k, windows will use 12k. you can set the allocation size to smaller to "waste less space" but in fact setting it smaller will hurt performance.

as for AHCI, when you run disks in RAID AHCI is no longer enabled. and that's just telling you. I wouldn't worry about it.

Vin

[flyfisher]

Re: Intel RST sees raid 0 volume but Windows 7 does not

Yes, format the array as a simple volume, using the default allocation unit as Vinster said.

[Explo]

Re: Intel RST sees raid 0 volume but Windows 7 does not

Great, it all makes sense now. Thanks guys

[Vinster]

Re: Intel RST sees raid 0 volume but Windows 7 does not

glad we could help

Vin

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Intel RST sees raid 0 volume but Windows 7 does not

Nice to see you got this sorted, it's always the smallest things that bugger us up the most!