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Alienware 14 Help setting up RAID
A customer brought me their Alienware 14 laptop because the hard drive died. A new one is on it's way and I've been researching how to set it up by factory. My only problem is, when testing with random drives at home, I cannot access the RAID configuration. I've tried pressing Ctrl+i several times and nothing happens. As far as I can tell the only hard drive in the machine is just the basic standard SATA.
They want RAID back but if I cannot access the configuration for it, how can I give it to them?
Any help appreciated.
ejn63
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June 22nd, 2016 12:00
The system did ship with an mSATA drive (low capacity) to be used as a cache for the main drive. That isn't true RAID -- it's a cached hard drive. Is the MSATA drive present (look in system setup, F2 at powerup). If it's not there, the option won't show up.
ejn63
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June 22nd, 2016 14:00
Correct - the only RAID this system can do is Intel IRST caching - that requires one mSATA drive plus one hard drive (if you use a native 2.5" SSD, you don't need the cache anyway).
Scorpwanna
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June 22nd, 2016 14:00
m-SATA is not detected. Here is the service tag for the machine 17VZMX1. So RAID won't show up unless it has this m-SATA drive?
Scorpwanna
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June 22nd, 2016 22:00
Hmm. The owner must of thought they had it set for RAID then. I had asked them questions about the original setup and they kept on about it being Alienware with RAID. Even when they brought it to me, and it was showing errors and couldn't find the hard drive, the bios showed RAID selected. The owner told me they hadn't messed with the bios. Is there no 3rd party software that dell may of used to force RAID for a drive?
ejn63
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June 23rd, 2016 05:00
Setting the BIOS for the drive to "Raid" is not the same as setting up the RAID array itself (that's the CTRL-i trip at powerup).
You can set the system to RAID or AHCI under "Drives" in cmos setup. It may well have been set that way, but the only "RAID" the system can do is with a small mSATA cache drive + the hard drive -- true RAID (0,1) requires a pair of same-size drives -- which this system cannot take due to its small size.