Raid Controller??

[DontWorryAboutMe]

Hey Peeps, just looking for some info on what the hell to do with this...
I have a message on my AMD-Athlon start up saying that the hardware is not install right, Im pretty sure it has
something to do with 2 hard-drives is that right???
Any help would be great cheers!

[syphus]

This message is most likely from an on-board RAID controller starting up and detecting that there is no hard disk drives attached to it. Since you have decided not to give us any details about your system at all, it's very difficult to advise you.

If you tell us more about your motherboard, how many hard disk drives you have, who built it, what version of windows you're using and anything else pertinant, I'll tell you how to get rid of the message.


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On RAID

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks. It is a storage controller model that binds multiple hard drives together as a single logical unit. Putting that plainly you connect several hard disk drives to a RAID controller and Windows sees a single storage device. The advantage to this is a RAID controller can then handle data in special ways.

Disks in an array are called "Array Members", and must all be the same size. If they are not, all attached disks will be limited to the smalled disk size. There are a number of different RAID configurations. The most common are:

• JBOD (Just a bunch of disks)
  JBOD is the name for "no RAID" in the context of a RAID configuration. In JBOD, each disk connected to the RAID controller is a standalone logical storage device, just like normal.
• RAID 0 - Stripe
  The limiting factor in hard disk drive read and write performance is the disk speed (the speed at which data can be physically written and read from hard disk speed; somewhere between 50 MB/s and 70 MB/s), as opposed to the interface speed (which is 133 MB/s for IDE/PATA and up to 300 MB/s for SATA 2). RAID Stripe improves read and write performance by storing data in Stripe Sets across multiple disks, in a similar spirit to dual channel RAM. By doing this, it is able to effectively multiply the write speed by the number of drives.
  RAID 0 is numbered 0 because it is not technically a RAID in that there is no redundancy. In fact, if any of the Stripe array member disks dies, the entire array is lost.
  In a Stripe, the total usable disk space is equal to the total physical disk space: two 200 GB HDDs would equal 400 GB usable space. The minimum number of HDDs in a Stripe is 2, and maximum depends on the hardware, but is usually 2 or 4.
• RAID 1 - Mirror
  In a RAID Mirror, all data written to the Array is duplicated across all mirror members. This ensures that if one hard disk drive dies, there is no data loss. Mirror has a slightly slower write speed than JBOD, but usually a faster read speed that is fairly close to Stripe.
  In a Mirror, the usable disk space is equal to half the total physical disk space. For example, two 200 GB HDDs would yield 200 GB of disk space.
• RAID 1+0 - Combo (sometimes 0+1)
  A RAID combo array is a Stripe of Mirrors, or a Mirrored Stripe. Exactly as it sounds, either two Mirror RAIDs are bound in a Stripe, or vice versa. Various controllers support either 1+0, 0+1 or both. There is little difference between the two. With a Combo RAID, you get the advantage of fast reading and writing offered by Stripe, with the redundancy of Mirror.
  The total usable disk space in a Combo is equal to half the total of physical disk space. For example, four 200 GB HDDs would yield 400 GB of disk space. The minimum and maximum number of hard disk drives in a Combo is usually always 2.
• RAID 5
  By far the best RAID mode, RAID 5 is like Stripe, but every stripe set includes an additional parity block. This parity block means that if one array member is lost, an XOR calculation can be performed to regenerate the missing data.
  In order to perform the XOR calculations efficiently enough to accelerate storage, a dedicated processor is used. For this reason, RAID 5 capable RAID cards are considerably more expensive. However, there are much cheaper RAID 5 solutions that use the CPU to perform the XOR calculations instead. This is not advisable, as it can represent a performance impact in some situation. All onboard RAID 5 controllers that I know of are software accelerated in this manner.
  The total usable space in a RAID 5 array is the total physical disk space minus one hard disk. For example, a 4 200 GB RAID 5 would yield 600 GB of usable space. The minimum number of drives for a RAID 5 is 3, the maximum is unlimited.

[DontWorryAboutMe]

Hey, soz no info.. not sure if people would reply??
My system:
AMD-Athlon 3200+ Im using a K7Upgrade motherboard
1Ghz Ram
Geforce 6200 graphics card
XP pro with service pack 2
I have 2 hard drives
Both are 160GB-rpm 7200

Im not sure if i want to get rid of this message could i not use the Raid Controller for something??
Always up for learning something new!!

Need anymore info just let me know?
Cheers for your help

[syphus]

Since again, you neglected to mention what TYPE of hard disk drive you're using, It's difficult to advise.