AHCI and RAID on HP Compaq Elite 8000, 8100, and 8200 Business PCs
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Important RAID configuration
The following notes are important for RAID configuration:
• RAID 1 is the only RAID configuration that HP Elite 8000-series Business PC
products offer as a factory configuration option.
• All 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
• HP also recommends keeping the default options in the RAID Option ROM and
in the Windows RAID application. Options like “chunk” size for changing the
“stripe” size have more history in their defaults settings
Other supported configurations
HP Elite 8000-series Business PC products support two other RAID configurations:
• Two-drive configuration:
Two equal size/type SATA hard drive RAID configurations in RAID 0 or
RAID 1 or Matrix Mode of RAID 0 and RAID 1.
Maximum of two SATA optical drives (on HP Elite 8000-series Business PC
Convertible Minitowers).
• Three-drive configuration (only on HP Elite 8000-series Business PC Convertible
Minitowers):
Three equal size/type SATA hard drive RAID configurations in RAID 0 or
RAID 5 or Matrix Mode of RAID and RAID 5.
Maximum of one SATA optical drives.
Unsupported configurations
HP Elite 8000-series Business Desktop PC products only support configurations
offering the best user experience and highest possible reliability. As a result, HP
does not support the following combinations of RAID hard drives:
• Different sizes
• Different speeds (5400 rpm, 7200 rpm, etc)
• Old and new technologies (SATA 1.5 GB and SATA 3.0 GB)
• NCQ hard drives and non-NCQ drives
• Different cache size
• RAID combinations of hard drives with any operating system other than
Windows XP Pro (SP2/SP3), Windows Vista SP1/SP2, and Windows 7 using
Microsoft’s IDE driver stack based on ATAPI.SYS