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Missing Drive (not)

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by bkelly

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I upgraded my computer at home to an LGA i5 -2500K with a Asus Sabertooth Z77 Motherboard. 8G of ram 3 1T HDD's 1 30G SSD and 1 60G SSD. The first round I installed Windows 7 64bit on the 60G SSD thinking that would be fast. The 3 1T drives were present at the time. I installed Intel Smart Response Technology using the 30G SSD for caching. But I realized that didn't make sense since the 30 G SSD couldn't cache the 60G SSD. So I scrubbed the 1st install and reinstalled Windows partitioning one of the T's 310/620G. Putting the OS on the 310 and the Applications on the 620. This would leave the other 2T's for assorted storage and the SSD's for Smart Response Technology and Rapid Start Technology. It's my understanding that each type of Technology needs a dedicated SSD. After the system has been reinstalled and all the supporting software I observe that I am missing one T. It's present in bios but not in Drive Manager or anywhere else. When I installed I partioned and formatted as need and all T drives were present there. Any help will gratefully appreciated.

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by robo_dev

Did you perhaps RAID-mirror two of the 1T drives?

Within Windows Device manager, are you looking at hidden devices as well??

If you can see it in BIOS, then perhaps disable every other drive except it, and download/boot the diags CD from the drive maker....run SMART diags to make sure it's a healthy drive.

by bkelly

the problem. I went and set everything I could default and I also did the ctrl-i and entered the raid setup. I disabled any raid enabled drive and re installed win7. All is normal now all drives present. So the next question is what will be the best raid setup. I rekon raid 0 on 2 T drives since I'm not doing any data intense work and I am doing this to learn more than anything. Thanks for all comments and suggestions.

by robo_dev

Mirroring the drive can save a lot of time and heartache.

The only caution is make 100% sure the RAID controller, firmware, drivers, and even the drive (make/model/firmware) all are solid versions and play well together.

The point here is that RAID mirroring can work very well, but sometimes, like in the case of a couple of Dell systems I worked on, there can be flaky incompatitibilties causing the machine to think the drive has failed when it has not, or look like the drive is having write errors.

At a high level, stick to only the top brand-name raid controllers with the freshest firmware, and be careful even with the hard drives. Some drives that are made for consumer PCs (eg. WD caviar green) do not play as well with RAID as some server-class drives (eg WD caviar black).

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