Reboothing Issues with NP7280 w/ C300 drives in RAID 0

Got my new NP7280 yesterday and I quickly installed 2x C300 Crucial 256GB SSDs in RAID 0 in bays 0 & 1. I have a normal 500GB drive in bay #2.

I installed Win 7 x64 and on rebooting the system showed a failure of the RAID array. I went back in and checked in the RAID area of the BIOS and it then worked and finished the install of Win.

About every 3rd or 4th time I reboot it loses the RAID array. After several tries it will let me boot. It's 100% rock stable when running Windows. As a test I copied about 8,000,000 icon files and it did not miss a beat. It just seems to be an issue during rebooting.

I reformatted the drives as normal drives and during about 15 reboots did not have any issues. But, as RAID 0 it seems to lose the BIOS setting sometimes and reverts back to AHCI and other BIOS settings get lost.

I checked the CMOS bettery voltage and its at 3.159 volts, so that's fine. Even removed the battery to force a clearing of the BIOS. That's did not have any effect.

I do have the system updated to the latest BIOS from Sager and both drives are also to the latest firmware from Crucial.

I guess I could just run the drives w/o RAID 0, but I didn't really spend $1,100+(Drives alone) to do that.

Sager has said just to not use the drives and buy their Intel X25. But they are alot slower and not as large.

 

You might need to install the Bios version 728bv02hs found HERE...

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Yeah, I installed that BIOS update, and it does not seem to make a difference.

thanks

 

UPDATE:

Well after installing Win 7 about 12 times in the last three days using different configurations, I have found that the X7200 with the latest BIOS does NOT support the Crucial C300 256GB drives in RAID 0 or even as single drives.

The drives will randomly drop off. It seems that I was fighting two issues. One had to do with rebooting ( which seems to have been addressed in the 02fs BIOS) and the other is with the C300 drives dropping off.

I have 2x Intel X25-M 160GB drives being shipped in tomorrow and I have been assured from Sager that they will work with the X7200. They are not as fast or as large as the C300s, but speed is not worth much if it's not 100% stable.

 

Update:

I got the new X25-M 160GB drives and installed them in RAID 0. So far ZERO problems. I'd guess Intel drives would work flawlessly with the Intel RAID controller.

These drives are not quite as fast as the Crucial C300s, but way faster then standard drives.

 

Does the x7200 use Sata III ?
I am not sure you will notice much speed difference using Sata II between the C300 and X25-M.

 

I had a similar problem with my M17x and two c300 drives. I basically took one out, restarted the system and set the interface mode to AHCI via the BIOS. Then I allowed it to get to the boot stage (it'll say it can't find OS, which is expected), then shut it down. I placed the second HD back and changed the interface mode back to RAID and everything was back to normal. It could have been a seating problem, but reseating it didn't work when I left it the way it was.

I see you went to the Intel drives. I hope you enjoy them as I'm not too amazed with RAID 0 performance on my c300 setup. Boot up and game load times aren't that much different from running one SSD by itself. Only difference is the extra capacity. I would even say that the OCZ Vertex 60GB on my mother's notebook loads games a bit faster than my setup. But then again, there isn't much on her drive. Hope this helps.