Raid 0 to Single drive....success!

I have been using Acronis TI11 for the past year and love this software. It keeps impressing me.

I recently bought an Asus P5Q-E and use two Seagate 320 GB drives in Raid 0 (boot disk). The P5Q-E has two available ways for setting up Raid. One method is to use the ICH10R, the other way is to use Asus Drive Xpert, which is the one I have been using.

Drive Xpert consists of 2 specially colored (orange) SATA ports that are controlled by an on-board Silicon Image SteelVine SiI5723 processor. Drives hooked up to these ports can be configured for Raid 0, Raid 1, or as additional normal SATA ports.

The nice thing about the SI controller is that no drivers are necessary to load while installing any OS. After enabling the desired mode in the bios, the array will simply shows up as a single drive, in my case, Vista x64 recognized the raid easily.

I plan to move to a single boot drive (WD 640GB) configuration instead of Raid and decided to try restoring my latest raid image to one of the drives from the array until I receive the 640. Not only did it work, but it worked flawlessly with not a single issue.

I broke the raid by unplugging one of the drives from the Drive Xpert ports and plugged it into one of the standard SATA ports. Next, I booted from the recovery CD, configured the drive for boot/NTFS in Acronis, and then recovered the image to that drive. All I had to do after that was set the drive as the boot drive in the bios. I am really happy to report not a single problem with doing that. Vista booted on the single drive as normal.

I am not sure if using this method from ICH10R would be as easy, but the switch from drive Xpert couldn't be easier. Acronis has saved my bacon many times and the support is awesome. Thanks again guys!

 

That's how RAID enabing chipsets are supposed to work. The array should appear to the system as a single disk (the RAID part should be like the man behind the curtain.

If you don't have to install any drivers, it means the drivers are in the default set that come with the OS, which is a convenient thing when it happens.

 

Hi,
I bought a motherboard ASUS P5Q Pro and I'd like to make a RAID0 with two eSata (Silicon Image® Serial ATA RAID connectors: SATA_E1 [Port0, Orange], SATA_E2 [Port1, White]). I have two hard disk WD Raptor and I connected them to the above mentioned connectors. Now I want to make RAID0 and then install Windows XP on it.

Can you help me? what I have to do? It isn't necessary to click F6 when installing WinXP? I read that there is a function called Drive Xpert that do this, but I don't understand a lot...

Thanks,
Monia

 

Ok, I have RAID 1 and am thinking since I do an image backup all the time I am wasting a 640GB HD. So I want to come out of a RAID 1 setup and go back to 2 640GB HD's. If I do this per BIOS it says it'll destroy contents on the drives since I am deleting the raid set.

OS is XP Pro SP3.
Abit IP35 Pro mobo E8400 CPU
2 WD 640GB SATA II's

So I assume the following:
1) Power off and disconnect port 1 SATA drive for time being
2) Power on and go into BIOS and change RAID to IDE (or AHCI? does that matter?)
3) Reset to boot ATI 9.1 updated image (to support RAID)
4) Perform restore to drive from USB external where images are kept
5) that it?

I need to know if I will have to do a repair of the XP installation or whatnot before I do the ATI 9.1 restore piece. I'd like to do this either tomorrow night or over the weekend.

Thanks,
Mike

 

Well, I tried the hacks on the net and didn't work so I swapped out the 640's for 500's (using the 640's in a WHS box whenever it finally ships) and did a reinstall and patched it and imported mail, contacts, etc...and now will be using this configuration. Seeing I did image backups I was basically wasting a drive so I figured I'd break it apart. I kept hitting the 0x7B bsod so I cut my losses and reinstalled yesterday. Went pretty quickly too.