AHCI and RAID on HP Compaq EliteDesk/EliteOne 800 Business PCs

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Technical white paper

AHCI and RAID on

HP Compaq EliteDesk/EliteOne

800 Business PCs

Table of contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Basic AHCI and RAID definitions.................................................................................................................................................. 3

Benefits of AHCI ............................................................................................................................................................................. 4

BIOS / Software / Hardware Considerations ........................................................................................................................... 4

BIOS interface ............................................................................................................................................................................ 4

Software drivers ........................................................................................................................................................................ 5

Hardware .................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Limitations ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Basic RAID Types ........................................................................................................................................................................... 6

RAID 0 with two hard drives (striped) ................................................................................................................................... 7

RAID 1 with two hard drives (Mirroring) ............................................................................................................................... 8

RAID 5 with three hard drives ................................................................................................................................................. 9

Intel Matrix RAID Technology ................................................................................................................................................. 9

Configurations .............................................................................................................................................................................. 11

Recommended configurations ............................................................................................................................................. 11

Other supported configurations .......................................................................................................................................... 11

Unsupported configurations................................................................................................................................................. 12

Configuring RAID on non-factory preinstalled configurations .......................................................................................... 12

Enabling RAID through F10 System BIOS .......................................................................................................................... 12

Accessing RAID Option ROM .................................................................................................................................................. 13

Configuring RAID Volume using the Option ROM on legacy systems .......................................................................... 14

Configuring RAID Volume using the Option ROM on Windows 8/64-bit systems .................................................... 15

Notes for operating system installation ............................................................................................................................ 16

Intel Rapid Storage Technology software installation ........................................................................................................ 17

Using Intel Rapid Storage console interface to configure RAID ........................................................................................ 18

RAID migrations using Intel Rapid Storage Console ........................................................................................................ 19

Configuring Intel Rapid Storage Console for Email notifications .................................................................................. 25

Installation .................................................................................................................................................................................... 26

Degradation .................................................................................................................................................................................. 28

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Summary of content (28 pages)

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Technical white paper AHCI and RAID on HP Compaq EliteDesk/EliteOne 800 Business PCs Table of contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................... 3 Basic AHCI and RAID definitions.................................................................................................................................................. 3 Benefits of AHCI ...............
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs 2
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs 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 EliteDesk/EliteOne 800 Business PC products.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Table 1. Basic AHCI and RAID definitions Acronym or term Description PnP Plug and Play RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks. ROM Read Only Memory. SATA Serial ATA Strip Set of data on a single hard drive in a RAID 0 volume. Stripe Group of all strips going horizontally across all the hard drive members of a RAID volume. UEFI Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Software drivers AHCI driver In addition to setting the SATA emulation mode of AHCI or RAID in F10 Setup (See the BIOS interface section for more information), an AHCI driver is required for AHCI support. The Windows 7 image that ships with the HP EliteDesk/EliteOne 800-series Business PC has the Intel AHCI driver (iastor.sys) pre-loaded. The system can be freely switched between IDE to AHCI.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs C:\AddAHCI 3. 4. 5. Reboot the computer. Enter F10 Setup and change SATA Emulation mode to AHCI. Reboot the computer into the OS. An existing Windows 7 or Windows 8 image using the native AHCI driver can be updated to use the Intel AHCI driver (iastor.sys). The driver can be downloaded from hp.com .
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs RAID 0 with two hard drives (striped) HP supports RAID 0, but we do not recommend it for business PC users. Lack of redundancy causes less than half the reliability of a single hard drive system since the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of RAID 0 is equal to the MTBF of an individual drive, divided by the number of drives. Figure 1. Performance – RAID 0 with two HDDs Table 2. RAID 0 with two hard drives (striped).
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs RAID 1 with two hard drives (Mirroring) Because it is a very cost-effective way to increase system storage reliability and a great value proposition, RAID 1 is the only RAID configuration that HP pre-configures for HP EliteDesk/EliteOne 800-series Business PCs. RAID 1 provides high availability with minimal performance impact, as well as greater reliability compared to a single hard drive configuration.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs RAID 5 with three hard drives RAID 5 has been used in servers for many years and is one of the most common types of RAID. RAID 5 uses striping with parity data in distributed blocks across all member disks.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Figure 5. Matrix RAID combining reliability and performance with the same two hard drives.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Configurations Recommended configurations HP recommends factory configurations of the preinstalled RAID offerings for HP EliteDesk/Elite 800-series Business PCs. The preinstalled RAID offering is a RAID 1 volume of two identical SATA hard drives. HP EliteDesk/EliteOne 800-series Business PCs are based on Intel chipsets that provide a combined hardware and software RAID solution.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Unsupported configurations HP EliteDesk/EliteOne 800-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.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Accessing RAID Option ROM You can only access Computer Setup at system startup. To access the Computer Setup Utilities menu and enable RAID: 1. Turn on or restart the computer by clicking Start > Shut Down > Restart the Computer. The following screen (RAID Option ROM) displays briefly during boot up. The RAID configuration utility is English only.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Configuring RAID Volume using the Option ROM on legacy systems To configure a RAID volume using the option ROM on legacy (Windows 7) systems, perform the following: 14 1. Use the up or down arrow key to select Create RAID Volume, and then press Enter to access the Create Volume screen. 2. Select or enter the desired RAID Level (RAID1 (Mirror) in our example).
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs 3. Use the arrow keys to scroll to Create Volume, and press Enter. The following message appears. WARNING: All data on the selected disk will be deleted. 4. Type Y to continue. Configuring RAID Volume using the Option ROM on Windows 8/64-bit systems Windows 8/64-bit systems must be imaged in UEFI mode. To configure a RAID volume in UEFE mode on these systems using the option ROM, perform the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs 7. At the Advanced menu, select Intel (R) Rapid Storage Technology. 8. At the Intel (R) Rapid Storage Technology menu, select Create RAID volume and press F10. 9. At the Intel (R) Rapid Storage Technology menu, verify Volume 1 as the RAID volume created and press F10. Notes for operating system installation • After creating a RAID disk volume in the option ROM, you can install the operating system.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Intel Rapid Storage Technology software installation This section of the paper focuses on how to configure RAID using Intel Rapid Storage Technology software. The configuration steps are for application usage and supported RAID migrations. 1. Run SetupRST.exe. The initial setup screen appears as shown below. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Click Next. Read the driver agreement. If you agree, click Next.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Using Intel Rapid Storage console interface to configure RAID To use the RST console to configure RAID, perform the following steps. 1. To open the Intel Rapid Storage Console applications, click Control Panel > Intel Rapid Storage Technology The Intel Rapid Storage Console starts in Status mode by default. Note The report the applications generate is very comprehensive. You can view the report at View/System Report.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs RAID migrations using Intel Rapid Storage Console Migration to RAID 1 from two non-RAID hard drives Note HP EliteDesk/EliteOne 800-series Business PC products only support RAID based on two identical SATA hard drives in either RAID 0 or RAID 1 or Matrix RAID Mode of RAID 0 and RAID 1. At least 6 MB of free space at the end of the drive is required to migrate from a non-RAID to RAID configuration or an error will occur. 1.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs 20 3. In the Configure Volume window, name the volume, select the master and recovery disks, and specify the update mode. Then click Next. 4. In the Confirm Volume Creation window, check your proposed configuration, then click Create Volume to continue.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs 5. At the final Confirm Volume Creation window, click Create Volume to confirm that you understand the Volume Creation process and you want to continue the action. 6. Click OK after the action completes.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Click Next to configure the volume. In the Configure window, name the volume, select the two disks and specify if you want to keep data from one of the selected disks. Click Next to begin the confirmation process and start the Create Volume action. Click Create Volume to confirm you understand the Volume Creation warning and you want to continue the action. Click OK after the action completes.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs 4. Click Next to begin the confirmation process, review the selected configuration and click Create Volume to start the Create Volume action. Note HP currently supports only the default Strip Size (in this case 128KB). There is a performance relation between the type of data and the strip sizes. 5. 6. Click Create Volume to confirm you understand the Volume Creation warning and you want to continue the action.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs 9. To create two volumes based on your space, reliability and performance needs, select the size of the first RAID volume by sliding the bar or entering the desired volume size. For example, divide in half the available hard drive storage in two RAID volumes by setting the Percentage of Available Space to 50%, so that 50% of drive capacity is used for RAID 0. 10. Click Next. 11.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Configuring Intel Rapid Storage Console for Email notifications To configure Intel Rapid Storage Console to send notifications of specified events to a designated email address, use the following steps: 1. Open the Intel Rapid Storage Console and select Preferences. 2. 3. Select the type of event to initiate a notification (all three may be selected). Enter the email information. A. SMTP Host (required) B. Port C.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Installation HP desktops come with RAID software preinstalled. However, if reinstallation is necessary, use setup in combination with the supported flags as listed and described in the sample screen shot (version 12.5) below Note Flags and their parameters are not case-sensitive. Flags may be supplied in any order, with the exception of -S and -G, which must be supplied last.
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Technical white paper | AHCI and RAID on HP EliteDesk and EliteOne 800 Business PCs Table 6. Language support.
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Degradation In the unlikely event that one of your hard drives malfunctions, you will be notified with the following message: If this occurs, perform the following steps: 1. Run the Intel Rapid Storage Console application on the system experiencing a degradation to identify the hard drive that failed and to which port it is connected. 2.