M17xR3 RAID 0 ISSUE

My M17xR3 only came with a 300GB HDD. I bought a 750GB HDD, and installed it as a second HDD. Booted it up and then Intel's Rapid Storage Technology kicked on. I choose RAID 0 after reading their manual hoping I would be able to move of my media files to the second hard drive.

Both drives got joined into a single volume 0000. The 750GB HDD doesn't even show up in Disk Management, but does show up in the Intel Rapid software and in the BIOS.

I spoke to Intel, and they told me I have to do a clean restore. ARGGHHH!!!!

What do you any of you suggest? Please help.

Thank you.

 

if you use raid 0 with a 300gig drive and a 750, you essentially get a 600 gig drive with access times that are = or worse than the slowest drive. As someone who has designed enterprise level raid hardware, I fail to understand the obsession with raid 0 (which by definition violates the first part of raid (redundancy)).

If you are looking for speed, I would recommend ditching the 300gb drive, and getting an ssd. use the ssd for your OS and apps. Use the 750 for your data and media. do not use raid.

If you are looking to not spend any more money, I'd just reinstall windows (probably on the 750 as it's likely to be a faster drive). I would again avoid raid.

What you describe happening is pretty much expected. migrating from 1 disk to a 2 volume mismatched raid 0 array will almost always end badly.

 

Thank you for replying DarkPierce.

Yes, I do want to avoid RAID; however, I have spent all I could for now on this laptop. So an SDD is outta of the question for a few months. I already swapped the 300GB with the 750GB, and will use my 300GB as a second HDD. Now I just need to do a clean install of my entire system. http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/556721-how-clean-windows-7-install-driver-install-order-guide-alienware-systems.html

Should I set my system to ATA or AHCI?

Thank you.

 

ahci or raid but not ata.

the bios setting of raid doesn't force you to actually use raid. It's essentially a weird naming convention Intel decided to use...

But to keep it simple, just use ahci.

the ATA setting is basically there for weird legacy support (and randomly the occasional FW update to a HD) it would be considerably slower.

 

Cool.

Thanks again DarthPierce.

 

just to coin in...... i have had muchos trouble using RAID 0 ...1st off just the perpetual fear of HDD failure, and loosing the booting capability......

i really wish you would upgrade the 320 to a SSD u have no idea what you are missing...... you won't ever use hibernation,system restore or cache again......even the most basic SSD drives would give u a lot more performance than the fastest of HDD

 

i second that,although i would advise to keep system restore enabled but configure a smaller space for it.You never know when a bad driver or program happens,& system restore has saved my bacon countless times.

 

You can go into the RAID configuration utility (control + I) and reset the disk to non-raid. That is more than likely why windows isn't seeing it. If you have a single disk that is configured as a RAID disk, it won't show up during your windows installation process either.