HDD not showing after SSD Raid install

snadge · 17 Jan 2014

Hi

I have just installed 2 x 120Gb Samsung EVO drives in RAID 0, after successfull install of windows it seems my 500Gb Seagate HDD is not showing in windows... it shows in disk manager as 'foreign' dynamic disk and has little yellow triangle on it, I have data on it I dont want too lose, but I could take it out and backup data from it then format it if needs be, I wanted the HDD to work alongside the SSD RAID as I use it as downloads folder etc.

can anyone tell me how to get it on?

It shows as a boot option in BIOS, I think something may have happened too the BIOS as some of the data is missing in MIT, i should re-flash, its running on F13a Beta (Gigabyte H77M-D3H v1.0)

thanks in advance

whs · 17 Jan 2014

Set the BIOS to IDE or AHCI and your HDD should show up. Setting the SSDs in Raid does not really buy you much. I would not do that.

snadge · 17 Jan 2014

RAIDing my SSD's had doubled the speed (900Mb read / 160,000 IOPS AS SSD) , its what I wanted too do.

if I set to AHCI (would never use IDE) then it wont load windows as it wont recognize my install on the RAID array will it?

there must be a way to get the HDD active whilst using a RAID array - I refuse to believe that once you have a RAID array you can not use any other drives along side it?

thanks

whs · 17 Jan 2014

RAIDing my SSD's had doubled the speed (900Mb read / 160,000 IOPS AS SSD) , its what I wanted too do

Nice nums on paper, but in real life they mean very little - especially for the OS.

snadge · 18 Jan 2014

whs said:

RAIDing my SSD's had doubled the speed (900Mb read / 160,000 IOPS AS SSD) , its what I wanted too do

Nice nums on paper, but in real life they mean very little - especially for the OS.

do when im loading lots of large files from the drive...which I will be :)

madcratebuilder · 18 Jan 2014

whs said:

Set the BIOS to IDE or AHCI and your HDD should show up. Setting the SSDs in Raid does not really buy you much. I would not do that.

If you have a Z68 or newer chip set and a Sandy Bridge or newer cpu setting up SSD's in RAID makes a significant improvement. Intel’s RAID controller enables SSDs to act as big hard drive caches. Intel's controller has supported this for the past 3-4 years as I recall.

If W7 is already installed changing BIOS from AHCI to IDE stops the system from starting. It well require a registry hack to recover.

stormy13 · 18 Jan 2014

One thing everyone seems to have missed,

snadge said:

it shows in disk manager as 'foreign' dynamic disk and has little yellow triangle on it,

That being said, see option 1 here,

Convert a Dynamic Disk to a Basic Disk

snadge · 18 Jan 2014

that wont work stormy as it deletes everything on the disk and Iam trying depserately to recover the data, had I known this would have happened I would have disconnected the drive before creating the RAID on the SSD's

I have significant boot and load speeds since RAID'ing on H77 with Ivy-Bridge CPU, boot has gone from 16 seconds with single SSD to 10 seconds with RAID, application launches are instant and loading of large files really quick...so yeah its worth doing, ive tried both...

anyway, ive tried loading XP and Linux from USB stick and both can see but can not mount the volume saying it does not appear to be NTFS stream (possibly part of a RAID) - but it isnt part of a RAID?

Ive got the drive out and in a caddy and I still cant access the data? - I backed up all my important data to it before raiding the SSD's so I could restore from it later - no way should setting RAID on 2 SSD's cause this drive to stop working??

desperately need something that can just read the data and copy it onto another disk?

EDIT: Part Magic says it cannot convert it unless its a mirrored or simple volume? this is while its in caddy and seems to be less acceessible in windows than when in SATA port, I will put it back in SATA and retry

whs · 18 Jan 2014

madcratebuilder said:

whs said:

Set the BIOS to IDE or AHCI and your HDD should show up. Setting the SSDs in Raid does not really buy you much. I would not do that.

If you have a Z68 or newer chip set and a Sandy Bridge or newer cpu setting up SSD's in RAID makes a significant improvement. Intel’s RAID controller enables SSDs to act as big hard drive caches. Intel's controller has supported this for the past 3-4 years as I recall.

If W7 is already installed changing BIOS from AHCI to IDE stops the system from starting. It well require a registry hack to recover.

I realize that the measured numbers come out a lot better when you use an optimal setting. My point is that for the OS which uses mainly a 4K filesize and does not transfer massive amounts of data, the felt performance difference between an optimal setting and a so, so setting is rather marginal. The OS gets it's performance boost mainly from the short access time.

I run 6 PCs on SSDs - a couple are from 2007 and run on IDE. They all run great and I really do not notice a great difference.

That is, of course, a different matter when you do massive file transfers with large blocks of data like the OP suggests. In that case I can see that a faster transfer time is an argument - but only if you transfer from SSD to SSD because else you are being ruled by the 'other device' which is involved in the transfer. If e.g you transfer data from a HDD to a SSD, the speed of the HDD will rule. Even a very basic SSD setting can accomodate that.

stormy13 · 18 Jan 2014

This has nothing to do with RAID, and everything to do with the disk being dynamic. Means that the only thing that could read it was the OS it was on when the disk was set to dynamic.

Option 1 is the only one that will convert it back to a basic disk without losing the data that is on it. Even then it is not 100% guaranteed to work, but unless someone has a better idea it is also your only option for retrieving the data.