No Drive Letter For RAID 1 Volume

just choose new simple volume, format and you'll be able to assign it a drive letter. (7 will auto-align, i believe, so dont worry about that)
it's hardware raid so you will see just one huge drive / chunk of space.

Mike Connor said:

Just quickly;

QUOTE
"Thank you for reviewing this motherboard. However, this board does support RAID 0/1/5/10 on SATA III. In order to access the RAID configuration utility for SATA6G you must first enter the BIOS and set the SATA6G option to 'AHCI'. Then you can save an exit the BIOS and during POST upon reboot press Ctrl+M to enter the RAID configuration utility. If you need further assistance, please contact us at OC_Support and reference case number NE0480."

Best Regards,

UNQUOTE

Further;

Once the BIOS is set to RAID press <CTRL><I> during POST. An option will come up for about half a second to set the RAID up.

Then select the drives you want in the RAID.

Install the RAID drivers supplied by ASUS. ( Come with the motherboard ).

You need to do this before installing an OS on the array, and you need to do it before Windows boots if you are installing storage. Otherwise Windows will not "see" the drive array.

There are instructions in the motherboard handbook.

Regards....Mike Connor

@Mike Connor: the motherboard in question is an Asus Rampage III Extreme. The RAID 1 setup in question was NOT setup through the Marvel 9128 SATA6G controller, but rather through the Intel ICH10R Southbridge controller by pressing Cntrl +I during post. ICH10R supports RAID 1. Regarding settings, the SATA6G controller is set to “ACHI” for the single SSD where the OS resides (RAID ready); the six ICH10R SATA ports are configured as “RAID”. These settings were in place before the OS was installed.

The latest Intel Rapid Storage Manager drivers (v9.6.0.1014)have been installed to update Intel Matrix Storage.

The drives for selection in the RAID 1 array were chosen in the Option Rom Bios after pressing Cntrl +I during post. Thus, this is a hardware RAID setup.

Golden said:

sandoz said:

The two RE4’s have been set up in the option ROM and when the OS completes startup, Rapid Storage Technology indicates that the drives were set up correctly in RAID 1.

The drives have been initialized. However, the RAID Volume is not being seen by the OS.

This suggests the RAID has already been configured in the BIOS. Can you confirm this is the case?

Under Disk Management, do you see 2 x RE4 drives, or just a single volume? If its a single volume then the disks have already been RAID'ed in the BIOS.

@Golden: Yes, RAID is already configured in the BIOS. And, under Disk Management, there is only 1 disk seen. Note that when I open the Rapid Storage Technology console, it shows the two RE4 disks in the array and identifies them as constituents of the RAID 1 volume.

mlevy said:

I think people are overthinking this issue a bit. The volume is seen by the OS, this indicates the RAID drivers are working. Actually, the OS shouldn't be doing anything related to the RAID in this setup, the mirroring should be at the hardware level. That being the case, just right-click and select to create a new simple volume, make it the size and letter you want and format it. Keep in mind, I've never played with mirroring on a desktop PC level but I do have a good grasp of the concepts, I'm part of a support team at a 4,000-seat business campus with several hundred HP servers as well.

In a mirrored situation, you won't see much change to the drive at the OS level but if a drive fails you'll be able to replace it with little to no data loss. Mirroring is good protection against a catastrophic drive failure but in the event of a virus in the volume it will infect BOTH drives.

@mlevy: ‘New Simple Volume’ is the only option available when right clicking the unallocated disk (labeled Disk 0). The OS is on Disk 1 (Crucial 300 SSD).

Packet said:

just choose new simple volume, format and you'll be able to assign it a drive letter. (7 will auto-align, i believe, so dont worry about that)
it's hardware raid so you will see just one huge drive / chunk of space.

@packet: both RE4's are already formatted. Does that matter, or will it just reformat the drives?

Golden said:

Thats correct : reformat them under disk management and assign the drive letter - you should be good to go.

Thanks for the confirmation. BTW, is 64KB the best unit sector size for performance in RAID1 (will be using storage mostly for music and video archive) or should I just go with default?

Go to disk management and format the raided drives. You will see them in disk managment.

Worked well. Thank you for your assistance everyone.