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Aurora R4 - Adding a SSD with RAID 0 HHDs
I already have an Aurora R4 with stock HHDs in a RAID 0 configuration. I am not ready to replace the HHDs as the primary boot drives but I want to add the SSD to an empty bay. After the reading several forum posts a BIOS setting has to be in ACHI mode for the SSD to be recognized (?) What about my existing RAID drives?
Andrew
gregory.jones
412 Posts
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June 17th, 2016 11:00
Hey morkunas,
If you switched the BIOS over to AHCI, you'd then effectively disable the RAID of the two hard drives. Once done you could then install Windows to the SSD, where Windows might see the file system of the RAID, but you wouldn't be able to boot to it until you changed the BIOS back to RAID. But in doing so, you won't be booting from your SSD.
Having never tried it I can't swear that it would work - but you could in theory, depending on your RAID controller, install the SSD as a storage drive. In this way the RAID would not try to link the SSD to anything meaning you could use it as a blank storage. Which might be beneficial to you, as you could create symbolic links to any games you place there to get the super-fast load time advantage of SSDs.
But there's no guarantees on that. And, if by chance, your RAID is set to a 0+1 without your knowing, it would try to turn your SSD into a parity drive. That is, a backup drive for if & when the RAID needed to be rebuilt. You can look in your BIOS to see what the RAID level is.
Most people don't usually mess around with this kind of thing until they're ready to start their system over or do a major hardware upgrade.
Tesla1856
8 Wizard
8 Wizard
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17K Posts
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June 17th, 2016 11:00
While it is preferred, AFAIK ... AHCI mode is not required for SSD to function. In fact, pretty sure my old XPS-410 is still in "single-disc RAID mode" and SSD works fine and fast (up to SATA-2/300 limits).
And you probably know ... but for Windows boot drive on your SATA-3/600 ports ... I bet a single SSD is faster than any pair of RAIDed spinning drives.