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    Need SATA device order from an A18 owner

    Discussion in 'Alienware 18 and M18x' started by stevegula, Nov 10, 2017.

  1. stevegula

    stevegula Newbie

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    I need someone with multiple hard drives and an optical drive (or 4 hard drives) to go into the Intel Rapid Storage menu that pops up on boot and tell me the device order of the drives. Even better if you know where they are in your laptop.

    I have a RAID 0 from my old A18 that I'm trying to recover in a desktop PC (it's possible if you do it right). I had 4 hard drives in RAID 0:

    1 mSata in the obvious mSata slot
    2 SSDs in the dual drive carriage
    1 SSD in place of the blu-ray drive

    but I need to know what order Intel's RST recognized them as and Alienware tech support doesn't have an answer. The BIOS isn't particularly helpful because of how abysmally they name them (fixed drive, optical drive, second drive, eSata drive, mSata drive) and there's no guarantee that's the order they're actually recognized by the computer vs how some programmer made the list look.

    It would be great if you could list the drives to me something like this -

    Disk ID 0 = hard drive in carriage closest to the screws
    Disk ID 1 = other hard drive in carriage
    Disk ID 2 = drive in optical disk bay
    Disk ID 3 = mSata

    I've tried to determine the order base on other people's screenshots of their RAID setups and such and I *think* it's what I listed above but I'm not sure.

    Thanks for you help.

    Also, if anyone needs to buy 1TB SSDs then I'll have 4 for sale once I get through this debacle (3 Mushkin Reactor 2.5" SSDs and 1 Samsung EVO850 Pro mSata). And please spare me commentary on RAID 0 vs RAID 1 yada yada. I had a backup system in place... except I didn't. Due to user error my Windows Backup to a NAS / File History thing wasn't actually running like I thought it was.

    P.S. this is the best image I've found of someone else's setup so far -
    [​IMG]

    and I believe ID 5 is always the mSata based on other screenshots I've seen. I assume drives 0 and 1 are the double drive carriage/bay but I'm not sure which is which.
     
    Last edited: Nov 10, 2017