Problems setting my 2 ocz octane 3 ssd's into raid 0

Hi iv just bought a msi ms 1762 barebone (gt70) iv just fitted 2 ocz octane 3 solid state drives and trying to set them in raid 0 but when ever I do it it fails. I did get one message appear saying not enough space available. Has anyone got any ideas why I cant do this? Thank you.

 

You are better off leaving them out of raid since the second slot is SATA II and not III which limits both of the drives in the array to SATA II speeds. Use the primary drive in the SATA III slot for your OS and most used programs and then use the second drive for storage.

 

Is it even worth me having the 2nd ssd then, should I sell it and get a 1tb 7200rpm drive.

 

That's up to you, if you need the capacity then a standard HDD will give you that, but if you still want to use it for regular programs that would fit in the SSD then even under SATA II limitations it will be much faster than a normal HDD.

 

The Octane 3 SSDs are SATA III 6GB/s but you have only one SATA III bay in the 1762.

Only the primary drive bay is SATA III.The secondary bay is SATA II.This means that a R0 raid array will run at SATA II speed and performance.

If your Octane 3 SSDs were in a raid array in another PC and the array was not disabled in the old PC making both drives non member disks before removing them could be the reason for your trouble.

Also the if drives are still full of data if they haven't been made non member disks and formatted.

Making disks as non member disks in a raid utility does not erase the data on the disks.It only removes access to it.

If you have access to another working Windows machine you could put each drive in it as a non boot drive and clean it in Control Panel>Adminisrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management.

In Disk Management your can Initialize/set as basic volume/format

With 2 clean formatted SSDs you should be able to setup your raid array in the 1762 using the Intel RAID OROM Utility.

With any 2 drive raid array there's always 2X the chance of drive errors causing lose of data on the drives.

Meakers advice is good advice.

I had 2 x 240GB SanDisk Extreme SSDs in R0 for a while but now I still have the bios set to raid but my 3 SSDs are non member disks.

EDIT:selling the Octane SSDs and getting one large capacity SSD,256GB~512GB,to go in the primary drive bay is an option but with the low prices now on many SSDs you may not get much for your old drives.

The Samsung 840Pro,OCZ Vector and Corsair Neutron GTX would be on my short list if I were in the market for a new SSD.

Then again CES 2013 in Vegas is only about 3 weeks away with possible more good choices announced.

 

Thank you for the great information guys. The drives are brand new but formatting them in another computer sound an idea. I ended up installing my os onto the primary sata 3 and using the other drive as just a secondary. Would putting both drives in raid 0 as sata II not give me more speed than 1 drive in sata III though or is sata II that much slower?

Thanks guys.

 

SATA III is double the speed of SATA II (600MB/s in SATA III; SATA II = 300MB/s). I think striping two drives in SATA II speeds would give you equivalent performance (roughly) as a single drive in SATA III, so it's probably not worth the headache. It would be a different story if you needed RAID for parity and redundancy, but as far as performance goes in this scenario, the single SATA III is ideal I think.

 

Ok thank you ill stick with the setup them. Thanks.

 

You're welcome. Hope you enjoy your system!

 

I'm sure I will im loving it so far I just want a nice stable oc on the gpu now.