Intel ICH9 - SSD drive not bootable in RAID mode, IDE works fine

idata · ‎09-07-2010

Hello,I have 2 Raid-1 500 and 750 GB on my Asus P5-E motherboard (x38+ I9CH). I've recently bought Corsair Force F-80 to use it as a boot drive. But the motherboard can't see it while in RAID mode. The ssd doesnt appear in boot priority list,it doesnt appear in the hard drive list, it doesnt appear in the intel bios screen, even as a non raid drive. Only HDDs are shown there.Tried to plug a HDD instead of the SSD - it immediatly appeared as a non RAID drive. Though after starting up Windows an Intel Storage Manager correctly detects the SSD as a non raid drive. SSD's Smart is ok.

In IDE mode all is ok and it is bootable and I've successfully installed OS (Windows 7 x64) on it, benchmark showed nice stats. So I guess the problem has something to do with intel I9CH bios?Motherboard has latest (12.01) Asus drivers, I've also tried cmos reset.

idata · ‎09-07-2010

Yes their seems to be a bug with RAID and some SSD's I have seen a workaround for this which is to run the BIOS set in AHCI.

Now with both your RAID 1 arrays setup when you did them with BIOS set in RAID, when you change it to AHCI and install Windows on your SSD and install RST windows will see the arrays.

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=18859&lang=eng http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=18859&lang=eng

The real fix is down to a firmware patch for your SSD if there is one or will be one so you can set AHCI to RAID.

The odd thing is you must be able to do RAID on SSD because of reviews I have seen so it possible that the SSD will only show in RAID BIOS only if there are more then ONE SSD installed which makes for a bad feature if your trying to install one SSD with some RAID HDD's.