Setting up 2 ssds+ mSata & Benchmarking.

Hey. you can see my specs in my signature, I just got the 2 new ssd's for my system (bought the m4, and then was getting almost 25% off the intel one + no tax! I just had to take it cos it was their last piece )

Now if anyone could answer these i'd appreciate it and +rep you!

1) in My Computer, it only shows me my 180gb Intel SSD, the Crucial m4 isn't detected, but when I go on bios and check my drives it does detect the secondary SSD. how do I fix this?
2) I haven't setup in raid 1 or 0 or anything yet. and when I first boot my computer, the intel rapid storage management thing says my mSata is disabled and set on raid 0, while my other 2 ssd's aren't set on anything.
3) What should I do to prepare my system for benchmarking? I don't know how to overclock & stuff, all I know is changing the switchable thing to only the 7970m so that it runs better. and keeping it on high performance with the a/c power plugged in. Also all my drivers (except the Killer n1103 ones cos they're bugged) are up to date (just installed win8 like an hour ago) and I have no programs at all except 3dmark11 & the driver programs like recon3d sound manager, catalyst control center, Bluetooth, etc. (Also I heard disabling my wifi/Bluetooth during benchmark yields better results). I ran Pcmark vantage on my m17x with a 500gb 7200rpm hdd earlier and nothing overclocked on win7 before upgrading my system and it had a 11297 score which compared to other m17x users was low.

 

If all you did was installed the Crucial SSD drives you will need to use Intel Rapid Storage Technology to join them in a RAID0 membership. You can either use Ctrl+I at first boot and do it in the OROM utility or do it in Windows. They are not visible in My Computer because they have not been partitioned, formatted and given a drive letter.

If you plan to stop using the mSATA drive for booting Windows and plan to do a clean Windows installation to the new RAID0 setup, see the instructions in the opening post of this thread.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...llation-questions-troubleshooting-thread.html

There is no point in adding the mSATA drive to the RAID0 membership. If it is smaller than the Crucial M4 SSDs it will limit your usable drive capacity based on the size of the mSATA drive and it will run at the slower SATA-2 speed of the port the mSATA is installed on. To take full advantage of the Crucial M4 speeds you will need to reinstall Windows on that RAID0 partition.

 

Okay, my mSata is pretty useless now cos it's not doing anything. but I joined the intel 330 and m4 in raid 0 at the start screen and combined got like 3305b of storage in raid 0. so now my local disk C: is one disk with both drives combined. I've installed windows 8 pro on it and just updated all my drivers. It's working fine but I don't know if I did everything correctly.

 

I wouldn't RAID 2 non identical drives tbh :/ can be performance/stability issues.

 

I dunno they seem to be working perfectly in raid 0. i hope i don't end up with performance/stability issues. ugh,

 

well the certain thing that you will lose is at least 60GB worth of hard drive space if not more since there is a different in byte calculation or whatever.