Win7 on Raid0

[derchris]

Hello all,

after looking at the review of the Corsair F80, I bought 2 of them for a Raid0 setup.
System is a Asus Rampage II Extreme with latest Bios 1802.
Bios set to Raid, and both SSD are in Raid0 config via ISM from Bios.

Win7 CD is booting fine, can see the Disk as one, with 167.7 GB.
But not able to install OS on it.

Error I'm getting is:

Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition.

Even the same after going to resuce and using diskpart.
I can partition the disk no problem, and format.
Can also format, delete, create partitions from the Installer GUI.
But it will not let me install the OS.

Looking at the logfile, I can spot the following error:

2010-10-31 03:41:56, Info                  IBSLIB CanBeSystemVolume: Volume at disk [1] offset [0x0] doesn't meet criteria for system volumes...
2010-10-31 03:41:56, Info                  IBSLIB DiskRegionSupportsCapability:Disk [1] is BLOCKED against capability [CanBeSystemVolume] for the following reasons...
2010-10-31 03:41:56, Info                  IBSLIB LogReasons: [BLOCKING reason for disk 1: CanBeSystemVolume] The selected disk is not the computer's boot disk.
2010-10-31 03:41:56, Info                  IBSLIB DiskRegionSupportsCapability:Region on disk [1] (offset = [0x0]) is BLOCKED against capability [CanBeSystemVolume] for the following reasons...
2010-10-31 03:41:56, Info                  IBSLIB LogReasons: [BLOCKING reason for {disk 1 offset 0x0}: CanBeSystemVolume] The partition is too small.
2010-10-31 03:41:56, Info                  IBSLIB CanBeSystemVolume: Volume at disk [1] offset [0x7e00] doesn't meet criteria for system volumes...
2010-10-31 03:41:56, Info                  IBSLIB DiskRegionSupportsCapability:Disk [1] is BLOCKED against capability [CanBeSystemVolume] for the following reasons...
2010-10-31 03:41:56, Info                  IBSLIB LogReasons: [BLOCKING reason for disk 1: CanBeSystemVolume] The selected disk is not the computer's boot disk.

Found one thread on Google for this exact same error, and the solution in this one was to upgrade the Bios. But I'm already running the latest version.

Also using Raid drivers didn't help. But they shouldn't be needed, as drive is visible already.
So I thought this is a Raid problem, lets take another disk.
Same problem. Looks like I'm not able to use any drive for installation with Bios set to Raid.

Next would be to use AHCI, but then I would loose Raid0 setup?

Am I doing something wrong here?

Any help is much appreciated.

Regards,
Christian

[mikemikemi]

I've had a similar error before, do you have any other disk drives connected during installation?

If so disconnect them and only try installation with the raid drives in, this includes removing any usb memory sticks after you've used them to load drivers.

[derchris]

Thanks mikemikemi,

that seems to solve the problem.
Currently installing Windows.
And as I thought, no additional drivers needed.
Still not sure why this was not working before, as I always had the same amount of disks connected.
Funny thing is, I played around some more yesterday, and it was even not installing with AHCI.
Got some 0x80300001 errors after loading the drivers from USB, as I could only see one of the new SSD disks. After loading the drivers, it was there as a single drive. Guess it could still see the Raid headers. But no installation possible with the above error.
And that was on every drive.
Anyway, installation is now going

So thanks for the help

[mikemikemi]

Good to hear it's sorted.

You should get some serious performance out of those drives in raid.

[peterb]

Good to hear it's sorted.

You should get some serious performance out of those drives in raid.

Not necessarily.. Difficult to tell what will happen with SSD devices, but the theoretical speed advantages often attributed to RAID 0 with conventional drives is rarely fully realised in RL and in some cases write performance can be worse. However it will be interesting to see what happens in this case if the OP can come back and tell us!

[mikemikemi]

Not necessarily.. Difficult to tell what will happen with SSD devices, but the theoretical speed advantages often attributed to RAID 0 with conventional drives is rarely fully realised in RL and in some cases write performance can be worse. However it will be interesting to see what happens in this case if the OP can come back and tell us!

Just speaking from experience, I put two SSDs in raid 6 months ago and got pretty much twice the performance, the seem to scale quite well (in benchmarks anyway).

Now back to a single as I couldn't really tell the difference in use and I'd rather have trim.

[peterb]

Just speaking from experience, I put two SSDs in raid 6 months ago and got pretty much twice the performance, the seem to scale quite well (in benchmarks anyway).

Now back to a single as I couldn't really tell the difference in use and I'd rather have trim.

And I think the highlighted areas say it all!

[mikemikemi]

And I think the highlighted areas say it all!

Exactly, which why I went back to the single disk set up.

But, still great to bench though. Quite ridiculous the speed we get these days when I think back to how "fast" ram used to be.