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

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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, 8200, and 8300 (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. The HP Compaq Elite 8300 also
supports disk caching, which is described in a separate white paper “Configuring HP Elite 8300 Systems for Intel Smart
Response Technology” available 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) 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.
HP Elite 8000-series Business PCs take advantage of Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) technology and the
integration of RAID support into select Intel chipsets. Table 1 lists the HP business PC platforms and associated Intel
chipsets that provide native RAID support.
Table 1: HP Elite 8000-series Business PCs and Intel chipsets with RAID support
HP business PC Intel chipset Chipset components
Elite 8000 Q45 Express 2; Q45 GMCH & 82801 ICH10
Elite 8100 Q57 Express/5 Series 1; Q57 PCH-D0
Elite 8200 Q67 Express/6 series 1; Q67 PCH-D0
Elite 8300 Q77 Express/7 series 1; Q77 PCH-D0