SSD and HDD RAID

[Sphinx4311]

Is it possiable to have a SSD boot drive in ACHI and have 2 HDD's in RAID 0 as storage drives?

 

[sminlal]

Generally speaking you have to set the mode to "AHCI" or "RAID" for all the ports on a given disk controller. If you have two disk controllers then you could set one to "AHCI" and the other to "RAID" to accomplish what you're looking for.

 

[Sphinx4311]

Thats unfortunit, since I have no PCI for another raid controller.

 

[foscooter]

To answer your OP, YES.

However, the controller in BIOS must be set to RAID, to use RAID. But you don't have to set up all drives into a RAID array.

If you have a SSD drive, you wouldn't add it the the array, only the HDDs. ANd TRIM would be supported with Windows 7 for the SSD.

I believe, and I could be wrong, if the SATA controller is set to RAID, and a drive on that controller isn't in a RAID array, it defaults to ACHI.

sminlal refers to if you have 2 SATA controllers on the motherboard. Yes, they are out there. My Asus P6T has it. 6 SATA ports for the Intel ICH10 controller, and 2 SATA ports for the JMicron IDE/SATA controller. (I don't ever use the JMicron SATA ports!)

What motherboard do you have?

 

[Sphinx4311]

I have an alienware mobo, they make there own actually. It is 58x chipset.

 

[sminlal]

I believe, and I could be wrong, if the SATA controller is set to RAID, and a drive on that controller isn't in a RAID array, it defaults to ACHI.

When the motherboard chipset is in RAID mode, the OS uses special RAID drivers to access the disks. The chipset ultimately talks to the disk using AHCI, but any software that is running at the OS level needs to talk to the disks via the RAID drivers rather than the via standard AHCI driver.

There are some utilities (such as some SSD firmware update utilities) that require the chipset to be in AHCI mode in order to talk to the drive.

 

[Sphinx4311]

So what do I need to do to have my SSD running my OS with TRIM and my 2 HDD in RAID 0?

 

[sminlal]

Oh, well you should have said that was what you were after right from the start!

The latest Intel ICHxx drivers will pass TRIM commands to an SSD even if the chipset is in RAID mode, as long as the SSD itself is not configured as a RAID array. See: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/18653

If the SSD is part of a RAID set (two SSDs in RAID 0, for example) then you're out of luck.

 

[foscooter]

To further elaborate on sminlal's reply (BTW: He is the bomb!), you only need Windows 7 to get TRIM support for a SSD.

TRIM is not supported when a SSD is part of a RAID array (like mine), but it can be a single SSD in RAID, but not part of an array (duh, only 1 drive), will get TRIM.

Does this help?

 

[Sphinx4311]

Yes thank you! I recived my SSD today! Woot! Hooked it up and decided to do a fresh install of windows 7. Works super fast. What program can I download to test the speed of my ssd?

 

[Sphinx4311]

Best answer selected by Sphinx4311.