Strange HDD Behavior (RAID0 with sata controller in AHCI)

abbiathesnake · January 20, 2013

Hi guys! I'm in this strange situation. I've got 2 HDD, Seagate 7200.12 320GB each (FW CC49) connected to the same motherboard, same Intel controller, in AHCI mode. In Windows 7 x64 sp1 I can only see and use them paired togheter, if I connect only one of them Windows sees a big partition of 640GB that won't work, together same thing but it works and it has RAID0 performance (almost doubles seq reads and writes)! I tried Ubuntu and it sees correctly the HDDs as single drives, format them and use only one or the other no problems but Windows can't use only one but always both of them together as if they are configured in RAID. I used to use them in RAID0 in the past with another machine running Windows 7 but now I'm a little surprise of this behavior on a totally different machine set in AHCI on all the sata ports. Any idea?

PS. I don't use them as a boot drive but only storage, my boot drive is a 120GB Samsung 840.

Ssoele · January 20, 2013

If I understand correctly, you use software RAID (in Windows) and not hardware RAID (in the BIOS), am I correct?

Are you able to convert the disk (that should be now a dynamic disk) back to a basic disk? (In Disk Management)

abbiathesnake · January 20, 2013

Nope, no software RAID involved, nothing. I just plug the HDDs to my mobo and Windows sees them as a single 640GB disk. Even in device manager it sees them as a single device named "RAID 0" , the name I gave to my RAID0 array back on my old different build. In disk manager it's a basic drive, I'll attach an image. It's in italian but I think it's comprehensible anyway. "di base" means basic. It's crazy right? I don't know what to think...

"Raid" is the name I gave to the drive, because it's funny....

[ATTACH=CONFIG]n1883[/ATTACH]