AHCI and RAID on HP Elite 8100 Business PCs

Configurations

Recommended configurations

HP recommends factory configurations of the preinstalled RAID offerings for HP Elite 8100 Business PCs.

The preinstalled RAID offering is a RAID 1 volume of two identical SATA hard drives.

HP Elite 8100 Business PCs are based on the Intel Q57 Express/5 Series chipset, which is a combined

hardware and software RAID solution. The Intel mass storage controller allows all drives to operate in IDE

or RAID SATA modes. Each mode of the controller means a different PCI controller, with different device

ID, class code, and driver support.

NOTE: HP recommends and only supports Microsoft’s IDE driver stack based on the ATAPI.SYS driver for

HP Compaq Business PC products including all supported RAID configurations.

WARNING: The PCI Device ID of the mass storage controller changes after changing IDE mode. Chang-

ing the BIOS from IDE mode to RAID mode is the equivalent of connecting the hard drives to a new add-

on RAID storage controller. The installed operating system on the hard drive is unaware of this new mass

storage controller. If the operating system does not have the RAID drivers enumerated and PnP for the

RAID controller, the operating system will fail to boot (blue screens) when Microsoft XP, Vista or Windows

7 attempts to boot.

Table 5 RAID Drives

NOTES: The following notes are important for RAID configuration:

• RAID 1 is the only RAID configuration that HP Elite 8100 Business PC products offer as fac-

tory configurations.

• The pre-configured systems:

- Are complete RAID systems.

- Have both drives installed.

- Have the necessary Option ROM configuration.

- Are pre-loaded and pre-installed with all required Intel software.

- Include a preinstalled operating system that is mirrored mode out of the box.

Mode Purpose Minimal HDD Required

RAID 0 Striped for Performance. 2

RAID 1 Mirrored for Protection. 2

RAID 5 Parity for Accuracy. 3

RAID 0 + 1 Mirrored and Striped. 4*

Intel’s Rapid Technology 4 logical drives on 2 physical disks, to emulate

RAID 0 and 1.

* Not supported on HP

Elite 8100 Business PCs.