P8Z68-V single SSD + RAID1 data array

[mikeangle]

So i builit my new system with P8Z68-V mobo and a single Intel X25-M 160GB SSD drive. The SSD is connected to 6Gb ps port, the drive is set to AHCI mode in BIOS and I'm running Windows 7 x64... everything is working fine.

I decided to add RAID1 data array. So I put two 750GB Samsung drives in the system (connected to 3Gbps ports), and follwed instructions to setup RAID on this chipset/mobo. The first thing one is supposed to do is change SATA mode from AHCI to RAID. I did that and saved and then entered intel raid utility (Ctrl-I) where i built my RAID1 volume. Everything ok so far...

However, the problem is if go back to BIOS I can't select my SSD drive as the boot device. The only options for boot devices that I have are RAID1 volume and my CDROM. So this is not even an issue with Windows... ASUS bios simply doesn't wan't to recognize my SSD drive as a boot device when SATA mode is set to RAID.

Of course, if i then change SATA mode back to AHCI, save and reboot the system boots just fine from the SSD drive.

So what's going on here? Does anyone know how to set this up ... it looks to me plain vanilla configuration, I can't believe it's not working out of the box.

 

[danraies]

I have no idea why that doesn't work. I have an identical setup with a P8Z68-V PRO, a Crucial M4 128GB, and two Seagate 2TB drives in RAID1. The only thing I did differently was set my SATA controller to RAID mode before I formatted/installed the drive. That could be your issue but in theory, when the motherboard is in RAID mode any non-RAID drives should default to AHCI, so it shouldn't treat the SSD any differently than when it was in AHCI mode.

I know this post was a few days ago - have you had any progress?

 

[danraies]

Actually I just thought of something. In my motherboard (which is almost identical to yours), when you set the boot order you can't put several different hard drives in the list. You can have "boot from hard drive" in the list, but then there's a different place where you set the order that the hard drives are to boot. I don't have access to my computer or manual right now, but I think that in the "boot" tab there's a "hard drive boot priorities" option or something like that. In that menu see if you can put the SSD as the first in the list.