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

Unsupported configurations ........................................................................... 18

Configuring RAID on non-factory preinstalled configurations ................... 19

Enabling RAID through F10 System BIOS ....................................................... 19

Accessing RAID Option ROM ......................................................................... 20

Configuring RAID Volume using the Option ROM ........................................... 20

Notes for operating system installation .......................................................... 22

Intel Rapid Storage Manager software installation .................................. 23

Using the Intel Rapid Storage Console interface ...................................... 24

RAID migrations using Intel Rapid Storage Console ........................................ 25

Migration to RAID 1 from two non-RAID hard drives ........................... 25

Migration to RAID 0 from two non-RAID hard drives ........................... 27

Migration to RAID 0 from three non-RAID hard drives ......................... 28

Migration to RAID 5 from three non-RAID hard drives ......................... 28

Migration to Matrix RAID 5 and RAID 0 from three non-RAID hard drives

................................................................................................... 29

Migration to Matrix RAID 1 and RAID 0 from two non-RAID hard drives 31

Configuring Intel Rapid Storage Console for Email notifications (HP Elite 8200

Business PCs only) ......................................................................................... 32

Installation ........................................................................................... 33

Degradation ........................................................................................ 34

Introduction

This white paper covers the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) and

Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) drive technologies that are provided

on the HP Compaq Elite 8000, 8100, and 8200 (hereafter referred to as the 8000-

series) Business PC products. This white paper provides a basic overview of AHCI

and RAID technology, supported factory configurations of HP Elite 8000-series

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 is a hardware mechanism that allows software to communicate 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 dc7900 Business PC was 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 8000-series 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

employs two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance.

Initially used with servers, desktop PCs are increasingly using RAID by adding a

RAID controller and extra IDE or SCSI disks.