I have a Dell Studio 17, with vista.
I want to be able to dual boot with XP, but am needing a raid driver.
I have installed XP on a partition on the hard drive but if I want to boot up XP I have to change the option in the bios, which does get a bit of a pain.
I have a Dell 1749 into which I have installed two OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS SSD drives. Boot times are pretty fast using a single, non-raid, drive but I was thinking of configuring the two drives in a RAID 0 configuration to boost speed a bit further. I could not find anything in the bios settings that would allow the SATA controller to go to a RAID configuration. I guess, therefore, that at least the laptop that I have does not have RAID capabilities. Were there any Studio 1749 system boards that did indeed support RAID?
I bought a generic 2 HD sata2 RAID1 enclosure based on the chipset Silicon Image SteelVine 5744. It can be used in USB or eSATA2. This embedded chipset (named SiL5744) is known (understand "claimed") to auto-handle Sata I/II and host sata2 controllers that not support the port multiplier feature. The HD are two Samsung F1 1To. There's no jumper to rollback to SATA 1.5Go on them, you can only do it by flashing the HD's bios, however we don't need to do it as I wrote just before, the SiL5744 supports SATA 3Go natively.
The enclosure works pretty well with USB, but *not* in eSATA : the E6500 freezes/hangs just after the POST step (a potential driver issue with the installed vista 64bits is not the reason then). As soon has I disconnect the eSATA cable, the system recovers and continues as normal.
What I've tried/done so far :
Both E6500's BIOS SATA mode AHCI and IRRT mode were tested, Intel Matrix driver and software was updated to the latest 8.7.0.1007 version (AHCI and IRRT), The SiL5744 chip was upgraded to its latest firmware as well (in case of...)
In order to verify the esata cable, the HDs and the enclosure itself, I succeed to :
- Use the enclosure's RAID1 feature when using the USB connection, I could partition,format, and read/write on the logical volume - directly connect *one* HD (Samsung F1 1To) to the E6500's esata port -(I have a sata2esata cable), Vista installed it and I was able to use it as normal, even the hotswap feature seemed to work fine (I unkindly removed it). I could so test both HD individually this way... On the enclosure hardware side, everything looks fine then.
An IMPORTANT thing : The E6500's ICH8/9-M sata host controller seems to support the Port Multiplier feature *ONLY* on sata port 0 -as a bubble message from the Intel Matrix soft sometimes shows up-, but this is exactly where the internal HD is plugged on the motherboard I found nowhere you can change the internal sata port ID (switch,bios,ect...). I think this is the key of the problem that seems to be a dumb port conflict, because the esata port is in fact the port sata 4 (the DVDRW drive is sata 1, dock's esata is 5 for instance). If somebody knows how to swap the sata port ID, I think I won't be toasted !
Got my XPS 1730 today and as soon as windows booted, the first message I got was that a RAID 0 drive was failing and I needed to back it up immediately. Does this mean anything? Do I have a defective part?
Has anyone any recommendations on which driver to use on the studio xps 13. I tried to play fallout 3 with EVERYTHING turned off and set to the lowest resolution and it plays sooo slow.
I had a macbook 2ghz with a geforce 9400 card before I went to the XPS and still managed to play it at 1280x800 on medium settings.
I checked out a few reviews of the card and playing at these settings is way achievable but it seems like im having a driver issue?
I've seen a number of rescent posts where folks are still setting up RAID platforms even though dual core and now quad core processors are becoming mainstream.Is it the additional chipset that you demand or what is it that requires the additional hp you seek? there is no game out there I cannot play without it and short of CAD I see little use other than proffesional requirements (NIMBUS 2.1 or Zach, perhaps).
Picked up a great deal on a 1730 with a 128SSD and 320 2nd drive - Does anyone know if the 120 will be faster than if I were to go with 2 7200 rpm drives? The price difference for the SSD is "UP THERE" so I at least want to know if its as fast as a conventional 2 hard drive raid zero approach.
Also does anyone have any links to spec's for the Dell 128SSD? Is it the Memoright 128GB.
I've noticed the improvements are relevant but not as big as I expected, I think with normal HD the RAID0 performance will be much better than a single HD drive, any experience using SSD in RAID0 configuration
Possibly off topic, but it is related to a Dell Precision (workstation..)
A message that you don't want to see on your main file server..."TERMINAL DISK FAILURE"... Happily, I just pull the borked disk out and stick in a spare (of the wrong capacity, but hey...) whilst awaiting the arrival of a replacement...and all is well
Since a lot of people will be moving to Windows 7 this weekend with Technet & MSDN now available, I thought it would be good to share experiences relating to drivers and what is or isn't needed.
What drivers, if any, will be necessary to load that aren't included in the normal Win7 setup?
Is a Win7 driver available from Dell at this point or does the corresponding Vista driver work perfectly?
I'm going RAID 0 with my new 1730, and will be going 2 X 160GB in RAID 0.
The question is will windows defrag tool, know how to properly handle the 1/2 and 1/2 file fragments on both drives?
I would assume that it would, by simply moving a fragment and it's assosiated 1/2 on the other drive to the same spot on both disks? Or would it not?
If it's not, what defrag tools are RAID 0 compatible?
A serious question when you consider VISTA's "advanced" or more correctly "complicated" page/swap file use and RAID 0. The way I see it, is under defragmentation a raid configuration could be realy hurt by fragmentation as you effectively double the normal rate of fragmentation in a RAID configuration.
First have 2 drives of course. main drive and a Optical 2 SATA or PATA.
my howto is for a 320 and a 250 raided giving you 250/250 =465 real gb of space.
first partition the 320 drive when installing XP PRO so that you have your main partition 70gb and the rest leave for later. also just leave the other drive for later as well.
Install windows XP pro on the 70gb partition.
get your drivers etc programs etc and all other shit that you want setup.
next hack the registry to enable Dynamic Drives on XP-PRO. Funny cuz they say that you can't get dynamic drives on notebooks. not even with XP PRO.
go into : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetServices
and change the following . in the services dir there is each reg dir and the corresponding start value. you must change the start value to whats below.
then go into control panel, admin tools, computer management and then disk management.
right click on the windows drive and click on convert to dynamic.
it will pop up with a list of drives you have *2 of course cuz thats all we have* so check the other drive. and convert to dynamic. just say ok to the next few things it asks you. and reboot.
after reboot go back into disk management and right click on the second partition in the windows drive and click "new volume" and choose stripped in the list for what kind of volume. click next until format and do a quick format.
bingo you just created a raid 0 drive which will not be redundant but will be UBER QUICK.
mine has a 8ms response time.
sorry for my crappy howto. but I really wanted raid in my notebook and there was no howto's so it took alot of digging.
I'm trying to figure all this stuff out until my M6400 arrives. By creating this thread I hope others can benefit from this instead of searching and reading 100's of pages...
Since prices have dropped and they are more affordable now some will want to explore this options but not everyone is aware of advantages/disadvantages, benefit .....
I purchased a Sony AW230J/H believing it would be easy to convert to a RAID 0 array by installing my 2 Intel SSD drives. Turns out on this particular model they turned the RAID options off in the BIOS so I can't access it, and install a NON-RAID version of Intel Storage! But, striping/mirroring are available in the native VISTA Storage of Manage Computer! So, how can I create a RAID on drives that are already being used to boot into the OS? Or does anyone know any tricks to turn ON the RAID Bios so I can configure it PRE-OS installation? When I right click on the 2nd SSD (unpartiioned) all options for mirrow/striping/etc are available, but no drives to add to it. My primary drive has those items greyed out?
I just got my studio 15 1558 laptop with win7 home basic... son I changed it to win 7 prof. SO, I was installing all the drivers from CD and i was all OK but NETWORK is now ...
On my fedex tracking page it says my laptop got delivered but i never signed for it and the driver is saying someone at my house did. I called fedex and said they will have their security looking at it.
Dell is offering driver version 8.631.0.0000 (A09) for the mobility radeon 4570HD on their site.
I'm currently running modded catalyst 9.9 and the current driver installed is 8.632.1.2000.
Any reason I should use the Dell driver in this case or should I just keep on using the modded AMD one (which will probably be updated on a more regular basis)?
just wondering if a driver exists, and if so, where to get it? I am a bit of a newb to mac and have looked around and found nothing related to my problem (resolution stuck at 1024 X768