Intel RAID Setup Guide
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,264 words · ~6 min read
0:05
adata xpg V2 memory kits are optimized for the latest Intel gaming platforms
0:10
check the link in the video description for more details Welcome to our raid
0:14
setup guide this one is sponsored by adata so they actually provided us with
0:19
some ssds to show off the setup procedure for raid arrays on an Intel
0:25
chipset motherboard so in this case we're using the Maximus 6 Extreme from a
0:29
Seuss and we're going to walk you through everything from start to finish
0:32
although very briefly the types of raid that are generally supported by a
0:36
motherboard are going to be raid zero which is better for Speed but actually
0:39
worse than single Drive operation for reliability raid one which doesn't do
0:44
anything to speed but is much better for reliability but costs more per capacity
0:49
because you're doubling up the number of drives you need for a given amount of storage and raid five which I generally
0:54
don't really recommend running off of an onboard RAID controller because the
0:58
performance isn't great and migrating from one motherboard to another one can
1:02
be a bit of an issue in terms of um well
1:06
the data staying you know there all
1:09
right so the first step is to press delete or F2 or f11 or whatever it
1:13
happens to be on your motherboard to get into the BIOS you can see we already
1:17
have this set up so because we were cheating and we made sure we knew how to
1:20
set up a rate array before we started filming this uh what you're going to want to do is get into the SATA it's
1:25
usually under chipset or something like that so SATA configuration sometimes
1:30
will be multiple SATA chips sets on your motherboard you can consult them manual
1:33
or they're often labeled physically but you want to make sure all the drives
1:37
that you want to run in ra raid are connected to the same physical
1:42
controller and i' usually recommend using the Intel one unless there's a
1:45
compelling reason not to or on an AMD motherboard the AMD one obviously so the
1:49
SATA mode selection there's usually idci and raid so that should be pretty
1:54
self-explanatory go with raid then F10
1:57
to commit our changes and start the computer now when you boot up you're
2:02
going to see an additional option that you didn't have before if you weren't in
2:05
RAID Mode and it's going to say press controll I to enter the configuration
2:10
Outlet utility so from here you can
2:13
create raid volumes delete raid volumes please note when you delete a raid
2:17
volume you do wipe out all the data on those drives so be very careful with
2:20
that in fact when you create a raid volume you wipe out all the data on
2:23
those drives you can reset discs to non- raid etc etc etc so we are going to show
2:28
you creating a raid volume so in our case we're going to call it OS because
2:32
the only reason I can think of to build a very high performance massive raid
2:37
zero would be for an OS that you're not planning to store anything critical on
2:41
and you're going to do like nightly or even hourly backups because that is a
2:44
very very scary way to run your computer I would know because I do it and I've
2:48
had quite a few problems with that so you go down through these options when you select the drives use space bar to
2:54
select the ones you want to use and it'll actually only give you the raid
2:57
options that make sense for how many drives that you have selected so raid
3:01
five won't show up until you select at least three drives and RAID 10 won't
3:04
show up unless you select at least four drives when you're done press enter and
3:09
it gives you an option for strip size so generally speaking smaller strip sizes
3:14
that is to say how much data is written to each of the however many drives are
3:19
in the raid zero before moving on to the next one smaller strip sizes are
3:22
generally better for random and larger strip sizes are generally better for
3:26
sequential performance however your mileage may vary and it depends a lot on
3:30
the kind of drives you're running and the kind of data you're working with so
3:34
we're just going to go with the default option which I believe was 32 although
3:37
it doesn't matter we're not going to use this for anything capacity you can
3:40
adjust the capacity you want we're going to go with the full capacity of our
3:44
drives which is in there automatically create volume all data will be lost yes
3:49
we're okay with that once this is done all we have to do is press escape to
3:53
exit and we're ready to install our operating system on ASUS motherboards we
3:57
can press f8 to bring up the entire boot
4:01
menu without actually manually reconfiguring our boot devices there you
4:06
go I just keep mashing it on other boards it's different I believe it's f11
4:09
on Gigabyte boards for example so now all we have to do is go to our emation
4:13
clip which is our Windows OS so you would use your dis drive if you had a
4:17
Windows disc in the optical drive for example but in our case it's a bootable
4:21
USB so we're going to load this up and show you the last step here so it should
4:24
show up as unallocated space if for whatever reason your array does not show
4:29
up here what you're going to want to do is Click load driver and then you're
4:33
going to insert either a USB drive make sure you plug it into a usb2 port not a
4:39
USB 3 Port because that'll need drivers in order to function as well so you're
4:42
going to want to throw it on a USB drive or on an optical disc click browse find
4:47
the driver and install that but in this case we don't need it because we're just
4:50
using the onboard Intel RAID so we're going to go ahead and just click next
4:54
unless we particularly need to make a bunch of different partitions out of our
4:58
drive it does not improve performance in any meaningful way contrary to what you
5:01
might have been told in 1998 um so there you go we're going to go ahead and do
5:06
that okay one thing you can do is you can Short Stroke drives or you can leave
5:09
extra spare area on ssds but you don't want to just create a bunch of random
5:13
partitions for no reason unless you really really absolutely you're need to
5:17
do okay we're done now so basically there you go guys that is how to set up
5:21
a raid array whether it's raid zero which is what we did or Raid one or Raid
5:26
five or whatever else the case may be running off of an Intel RAID controller
5:30
built into your motherboard thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe like this video if you liked it dislike if if
5:34
you disliked it and comment on it if you
5:38
had some feelings that just can't be
5:41
expressed by doing this or
5:54
this