Installing Win7 onto a RAID of big drives

[ddrueding]

Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3
4x Hitachi 5400RPM 3TB drives
Win7 x64 Ultimate

When the BIOS is configured for RAID mode, and I enter the RAID menu (Ctrl-I), it lists all the drives and their capacities, and lets me create the RAID0+1 array, showing the correct capacity. Entering the Windows 7 setup, it shows 4 distinct ~768GB drives. This is the same behavior as having them as single drives in RAID or AHCI mode. In order to get the drives to show the right capacity, I need to be in "IDE" mode. This, of course, disables the RAID menu.

Grr. Looks like I need to squeeze a RAID card into this chassis. Any other suggestions?

 

[Mercutio]

I think that's what the Pre-install Kit is supposed to do for you.

 

[Mercutio]

... or maybe you just need to load a boot-time driver.

 

[ddrueding]

According to Gigabyte and Intel, all the drivers are already there. Just tested with 1TB drives and it worked fine. So it seems, at least with Gigabyte, and probably with all Z68 boards, that:

3TB is possible
Installing to a RAID array is possible
Installing to a RAID array of >2TB drives is not possible.

Shame, as the only RAID card I have kicking around is a bit overkill: Adaptec ASR-6805E

Further, even after installing the driver, I'm having issues going down this route as well:

Windows is unable to install to the selected location. Error: 0x80300001.

Now searching for a driver that will play better.

 

[ddrueding]

Yup. Newest driver from Adaptec (Feb 2012) worked fine. Yay.

 

[ddrueding]

The Adaptec ASR-6805E manual states that in order to get any arrays to display as an install target in Win7 setup, you need to browse to the drive folder and rescan twice. This works, but after that the install proceeds to the first reboot than fails showing the typical BIOS "MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM" error. Grr. How can this be so hard?

 

[Mercutio]

Maybe I'm missing something, but why are you making a RAID10 of 5400rpm drives your system partition in the first place?

 

[ddrueding]

My normal build for HTPCs is a smallish SSD for the OS and apps, and then a large array for data. The main service call I get on HTPCs is people filling the system drive with large media files. My thought was that this would solve that issue.

 

[CougTek]

Why don't you just move "My Documents" to the secondary large drive or array? They won't fill the system drive that way because it would be extra work for them to move things to the system drive from the location their stuff is saved by default. Users are lazy, they won't do it.

 

[ddrueding]

Why don't you just move "My Documents" to the secondary large drive or array? They won't fill the system drive that way because it would be extra work for them to move things to the system drive from the location their stuff is saved by default. Users are lazy, they won't do it.

I've done that and other tricks, but they always seem to find some way or some software that screws it up. This would be as foolproof as I could make it.

As it stands I've stuck a 120GB Vertex in as the system drive and will simply make regular housecalls to make sure it isn't going bad. Some systems aren't allowed to fail.