AHCI and RAID on HP Elite 8100 Business PCs

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Introduction
This white paper covers two drive technologies that are provided on the HP Elite 8100 Business PC prod-
ucts, AHCI and RAID. This white paper provides a basic overview of AHCI and RAID technology, sup-
ported factory configurations of HP Elite 8100 Business PCs, other supported RAID configurations, and
basic instructions on how to migrate non-RAID to RAID configurations in the field. HP also provides a
Smart IV Hard Drive technical white paper for Smart IV Technology on HP Business Desktop Hard Drives
on www.hp.com.
AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) is a hardware mechanism that allows software to communi-
cate with Serial ATA (SATA) devices. It is enumerated as a PCI device and it transfers data between system
memory and SATA devices.
The HP Elite 8100 Business PC is the first HP business PC to have AHCI as the default SATA emulation
mode in BIOS. All previous HP business PCs that supported SATA were in IDE (legacy) SATA emulation
mode by default.
HP Elite 8100 Business PC products provide support for AHCI in single and multiple drive configurations.
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a category of hard drives that employ two or more drives
in combination for fault tolerance and performance. Initially used with servers, desktop PCs are increas-
ingly using RAID by adding a RAID controller and extra IDE or SCSI disks. Newer system boards often
have RAID controllers.
RAID technology takes advantage of Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) and the integration
of RAID into the Intel
®
Q57 Express/5 Series chipset. This white paper provides a basic overview of RAID
technology, supported factory configurations of HP Elite 8100 Business PCs, other supported RAID config-
urations, and basic instructions on how to migrate non-RAID to RAID configurations in the field.