AHCI and RAID on HP Compaq Elite 8000, 8100, and 8200 Business PCs

17
Configurations
Recommended configurations
HP recommends factory configurations of the preinstalled RAID offerings for HP
Elite 8000-series Business PCs. The preinstalled RAID offering is a RAID 1 volume
of two identical SATA hard drives.
HP Elite 8000-series Business PCs are based on Intel chipsets that provide 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. Changing 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 6. RAID Drives
Mode Purpose Minimum drives 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
2
* Not supported on HP Elite 8000-series Business PCs