Peer Pressure

[BearCat]

Peer pressure has forced me to buy a Crucial M4 128gb SSD. It's on the way. I'm currently running two 10k Velciraptors in Raid0. I also have a 750gig WD Sata 3 drive I use for storage and two optical drives. All on Intel ports. I thought I knew what I was doing until I started reading all the posts and opinions and now I'm totaly confused. I want to put Win7 on the SSD on one of the red ports. I'd like to keep my Veliciraptors in Raid0. And I would put my 750GB on the second red port since it's Sata 3.
Is it all possible to install the OS first on the SSD and then hook up the rest of the drives, go back into the bios and Raid Utilty to get My Velciraptors in Raid0. I don't think so. I'm pretty sure I can hook up my storage drive after the OS is installed because it's not going to be in the Raid with the Raptors anyway.
Here's my plan. Please let me know where I might run into problems.
Break my current Raid in the Raid Utility.
Set Bios to defaults
F10 back into the Bios and set Sata as Raid
Set my Boot priority to the optical drive with Win7 in it as first
Set the SSD as the second drive in the priority
Go into Raid Utilty and set Raptors in Raid0
Save and exit.
Windows setup should start
When asked where to install Windows, point to SSD
Install F6 drivers in Windows setup
Windows will finish installing and I'll be at the Desktop and everything will be good. Right?
Install Chipset driver and the rest of the RSTE program

One other thing I would like to confirm. I've downloaded the new 3.1.0.1085 drivers. In the Driver folders there are two diffent sets. AHCI and SCU. Which ones do I put on the USB stick for the F6 part? Alot sure has changed since moving to X79 from X48. Any help would be great.

[Sofyan88]

just for info:
look the picture below

yellow column = is SATA 3 port that using Asmedia controller. NO RAID configuration setting, it's AHCI or IDE only. and it's for data drive only, NOT support ATAPI devices.
green column = is SATA 3 port that coming with Intel controller, you can setting for IDE, AHCI, RAID 0, 1, 5, 10. and recommended for OS drive or SSD. it's will increase your system performance
white column = is SATA 2 port that coming with Intel controller. you can setting for IDE, AHCI, RAID 0, 1, 5, 10.

I hope you will figure out how to setup your system

good luck.

[Arne Saknussemm]

If you do it exactly as you have listed I'm pretty sure Windows will put the 100mb partition it creates on the raptors and you wont be able to boot from ssd unless they are there always. Watch out for that.

[BearCat]

That's one of the reasons I wanted to disconnect all the HDD's and just install to the SSD. I guess there is a way to install RAID after the OS is installed. But you havta do a Registry Hack and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I think until I learn more about SSD's I'm just going to forget about setting up the Raptors in Raid and stick to AHCI for now. Sounds like the SCSI bug is still in the new drivers too. So maybe that will get fixed in a while.
Now that I'm scrapping RAID on the HDD's should I load any drivers in F6? If so which ones?
Thanks

[Arne Saknussemm]

If you're not going to raid and just go with the ssd and the other sata 3 disk on the red ports and the rest on the black ports as storage then there is no need to install any drivers during set up and the Microsoft drivers even work better for me with none of the problems. Just unplug everything but the ssd for the setup.

With your SSD as the boot drive there really is not much sense in raidng the raptors if you're just going to use them for storage.

I can't imagine though that you cant set up the raid, disconnect the drives and then install windows on the ssd with Raid mode set in bios. (maybe here you would have to install the raid drivers, which would cause you bugs with the SSD) The ssd will just be seen as a non RAID disk and TRIM will work. As I said just not worth it really. You will be pleased with the SSD!

[BearCat]

Yea, I think no RAID and M$ drivers is the way to go right now. Just got this mainboard last week so I don't want things to get too complicated. I appreciate your help and opinions.