RST sees different harddrive sizes - cannot build RAID

[idata]

Hi!

In my Win 7 HP notebook I have an internal hard drive which is a Seagate ST9500421AS -> 500 GB. I have Intel Rapid Storage 10.1.2.1004 installed. Now I attach an external Verbatim Store'n'Go eSATA HDD --> again 500 GB which actually contains a Samsung HN-M500MBB HDD. Both drives have 500 GB and show up with the same size of 476939 MB in Windows computer management.

Unfortunately, Intel RST sees different drive sizes - the Seagate is reported as 476940 MB while the Samsung is one MB less, i.e. 476939 MB. This is really annoying because I cannot use the external eSATA HDD for Intel Rapid Recovery backups as I wanted to - the Intel RST thinks that the external drive is too small - it must be greater or equal to become available for RAID building :-(

Now I repeated the test on an older LG notebook with Win XP and the latest Intel RST 10.8.0.1003 installed. Unfortunately the same problem shows: The internal Seagate drive is reported with 476940 MB but the Samsung is reported again with 1 MB less, i.e. 476939 MB. The even more strange thing is that Win XP computer managements reports both drives with the same size of 476938 MB but this is again 1 MB less than the one reported on the Win 7 computer management utiltiy...

Why are these differences and can the problem be solved? Any help is welcome...

Best regards,

Anguel

[idata]

To answer my own question: It seems that it is possible to use both HDD in recovery mode but I needed to create the RAID Recovery Array through the Intel ROM, not Intel RST in Win7. The negative side effect is that all data on both disks will be lost! So I restored my Acronis image to the new array. Unfortunately Intel RST in Win7 did not manage to mirror the master disk to the external eSATA drive correctly hereafter. I had set the array to manual recovery update mode. As soon as I started manual update it took a couple of seconds and told me that it has finished mirroring which is not possible in that short time. So I had to go back to the Intel ROM, reset the recovery disk and then rebuild the recovery disk in Win7. This took a very long time as expected. BTW: If you need to check for errors it seems that you need to switch to immediate update mode first and then start checking. In manual update mode this option is not available. In conclusion, the whole rapid recovery thing is nothing I would really rely on. There are some instabilities and strange things going on. It is also possible to receive some blue screens.