AHCI and RAID on HP Compaq Elite 8000, 8100, 8200, and 8300 Business PCs - Technical White Paper

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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.
CAUTION: 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.
The following notes are important for RAID configurations:
• RAID 1 is the only RAID configuration that HP Elite 8000-series Business PC products offer as 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 size “stripe” size have more history in their defaults settings