Raid 0 Setup on R2

I thought I had what i needed untill i started doin some thinking..... The drivers i have for the raid setup during the fresh install of win 7 are for the nvdia chipset. So i went to the driver page for the r2 and that chipset does not show any drivers for the raid controller.... After extracting the nvida folder there is a folder that has raid drivers. The r2 intel chipset does not... Can i use the others. Are there new ones. Do i need them for the install.... please help.

 

No one have any ideas?????

 

Grock69,

Dell hasn't posted the PreInstallation Environment driver for the R2 yet. Here is the download from the Intel site:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=17884&lang=eng

 

Wow thanks. I wouldnt have thought to look there lol. Thanks (+rep) 1 question though maybe you can help me with. In the documentation on the link it says the "F6" method it not required for Vista or Win 7 setups... Does this mean it will not need the raid driver.... Thanks again.

 

Well, Damnit Dell needs to have these things. Thats a pretty important driver is it not? You need it to set up a raid 0 configuration when doing a clean install of windows 7 right?

 

Ya, I dont think you need these drivers for Windows 7 clean install. Here, is this what your looking for? Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver http://support.dell.com/support/dow...typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=363973

 

I hope this is the case. Im not sure why at this time you would still need these types of drivers..... I mean can this not be implemented into the OS install for example and not need a 3rd party driver... Just me but seems like this would be easy and save people some time by not HAVING to get these drivers before the fresh install.

EDIT - I downloaded and dont see the raid driver.... possibly I do not know whata i am looking for. But the R1 raid driver was in a folder labeled raid....

 

Hmm, after reading this and thinking about my own system I have some questions (not to hijack the thread, sorry).

My R2 did not come RAIDed, so I went into the utility, enabled it, and reinstalled using the disc that came with the system. 0 seemed to work fine; it displays my drives as a single 1TB entity, but I never noticed any speed increase whatsoever, and the WEI rating for the HDDs remains the same (figured it'd be bumped up, because RAID 0 speeds up the drives).

Is it possible I missed a driver install? Or would RAID not work at all without it?

I'm not knowledgeable of RAID, I've never set up an array before the R2 and didn't even know RAID needed its own driver until reading this thread. Thanks for any replies.

 

Shouldnt the R2 RAID drivers be built into the BIOS? You can enable it the BIOS dont then install the drivers after you install the Windows 7 OS from the link I posted above.

 

If the RAID drivers are built into the bios, why would I have to install them afterword? Sorry if I'm not reading that correctly.

 

It should depends on the stripe size. There is a lot of literature debating on how to optimize the size...unfortunately optimization depends on your own files size.

 

Yea I see what you are saying. But from reading during the R1 for the fresh install before windows would even start its install you had to install the raid drivers. I will look for the link and see if i can post and clear up what i am saying or trying to figure out. Because the win install has to be installed in the RAID format other wise it is going to try and install on 1 drive.

EDIT - http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1649-clean-install-windows-7-a.html

This link shows where you need to insert USB with raid drivers during windows install

 

Ya, you dont have to with windows 7. It uses its own temporary RAID drivers during the clean install THEN you can install the RAID drivers from dells website or from the direct link i posted above.

 

Question becomes is it even worth it? I was debating going with RAID on my M17x but now I'm wondering if I should even bother. An earlier poster stated he noticed no considerable difference, what this just due to bad drivers?

 

RAID 0 isnt supposed to be faster than a single drive, just as fast. It will keep 2 drives running as fast as one drive alone would be. Other wise technically, 2 drives without the RAID 0 would be slower than 1 drive without raid because the computer has the process data from 2 drives so it would be slower. The RAID compensates for this and has both drives running in sync therefor can run both the drves at the same speed as if you only had 1 drive.

 

Im not sure thats true...... From all the reading I have done RAID 0 IS supposed to be faster. At least in theory. There are two drives... You are ,for conversation sake, writing everyother bit to one drive and the other bit to the other. This means your writing the data in half the time or at least 2 times faster.

http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/l/aaRAIDPage1.htm

This page about half way down shows RAID 0 and the advantages as well as the disadvantages...... should clear that up

 

Yes, but either way its smart to setup the raid if you have 2 drives as opposed to just using one for storage and the other for the OS.

 

That is only true with generic drivers. You cannot use windows standard drivers on any sort of raid arrays when an LSI/Areca/3ware/adaptec raid controller is used. Since your laptop has an intel fake raid controller the generic driver will work just fine. But please note that you need to set up the raid array in the raid bios before you proceed to installing windows.
If your system is not loading or seeing the drives, check that the raid array was created fine, and check to see that the drives are seen by the main BIOS. You may need to download the appropriate raid driver from intel's website. You will need to install it on a bootable floppy disc, then press F6 when windows prompts you to, then you press "S" and enter, and your all good to go.

If you cant get it to work, I wouldnt fret over it. Intel raid controllers are sub-par to say the best about them. The performance gain you will get will be negligable at best

K-TRON

 

Does that mean R2 owners would not be able to set up RAID which does could improve performance for now

 

You can set up a RAID array on your laptop, but it will perform just like a software based raid controller would. Software raid is far behind hardware raid. Unfortunately software raid happens in notebooks since there is a limited amount of space. The performance gains are all hype. Software raid on any platform with any drive is not going to give you twice the harddrive performance as alot of people on this site say it will. You are looking at a performance gain of around 5% using software raid 0

K-TRON

 

Thanks For everyones Help

 

I do not want to be negative, but please ignore everything you have seen about raid in this thread, because it is really bad information.

Raid 0 should be faster - probably around 50% faster or more in benchmarks of straight writes. Random access of data will not see a speed increase (from an access time perspective).

The reason people use raid 0 is most often for increased write speed for high speed data capture (ie uncompressed video). Using raid 0 on a notebook is pretty much completely useless, and is a horrible idea for data integrity. You have increased your chances for unrecoverable data by a huge amount when you use raid 0. If one drive dies, you are screwed bigtime.

Best bet is to use the drives as just plain old drives. Todays drives are fast, and if you need faster get an SSD.

 

How much faster is a SATA2 hard drive running at 7200.4RPM compaired to an IDE drive running at 7200 RPM? Both 2.5 inch laptop drives.

 

everything being the same, there would be pretty much no difference.

 

So thats the reason that all the R2s ordered with raid0 didn't come with it! The person who does the windows install on all our R2's must have known this and was just trying to save us from ourselves.