gt683r MSI-16F2 no RAID options in bios

I got a model with i7 and 750gb wd hdd and bought another one thinking RAID 0 will boost perfomance a bit, but what a great disappointment was that there are no raid options in bios, but on a box it says clearly optional dual sata hard drives with raid 0.
So I went to msi site and found two bios availiable - one for sku with raid and one for sku without, can i just flash bios with raid so it will be availiable to me?

 

Do you have the GT683 or the MS-16F2? The bios and EC are different for each. If you have the barebone I can send you the bios and EC. If you have the branded just download the bios and EC from the msi site for the raid model.

 

I think i have gt683... in our country there are no version with "r"
Well box is all msi and stuff but on box it says MS-16F2 then MKT NAME: GT683-283RU. I can check what it says in bios also.
On msi site two bios files are exactly same size for sku with raid version and without MSI Global ? Notebook - GT683

 

I got a GT680 model and I updated the bios to GT680R which has the raid 0 option. It works like a charm so update the bios and you'll be ok.

Regards!

 

Just download the raid bios from the msi site and flash, the raid option will appear in the bios.

 

Thanks for replies guys! Currently formating memory card for bios flash utility, hopefully I'll come back later this day with comparison of single hdd vs raid 0 benchmarks
-----
Bios update went smoothly now it says i have gt683r, sweet
Single HDD:

Raid 0:

Overall it fells way faster than before, pretty damn close to ssd.
Heck it's even faster then my old vertex 2 90gb ssd in pc, never expected that from 2.5" hdd.
Guess MSI tells the truth, going raid really is at least 70% increase

 

You made me go and buy a HDD to have raid

 

Yes indeed, this is the first time i actually see number results from a single config to a raid 0. my question to you sir is what score are u getting in the windows experience?? seems that people get the same 5.9 for both single and raid0... perhaps windows only testing one?? ore something like that.

anyways, great speeds. im sold. now buying the new 683r

 

It is most likely 5.9 still. The only way you can get above 5.9 is if you are using a SSD. Raid will not push it above 5.9.

 

I am going in other direction. I bought with the Raid (2 X 500mb) and I just dropped in a 120 GB SSD.

It is fast and the experience number is 7.2 for HDD.

BUT I can not figure out how to get it running with the SSD and one of the HDDs. As soon as I put the other HDD in the boot time goes to 45 seconds and the drive will not show up. When I go into system tools it cannot initialize the drive and gives an I/O error.

The only thing I can think of is to flash the bios to the non raid version.

Any thoughts? Can anyone point me to how to make a bootable MSI Bios flash USB drive?

Thanks.

 

The problem is the drive is still a "raid" drive. Before you removed the the drives you should have gone into the raid utility and reset the drives to "non raid disks". You can reinstall both drives and do this or get a disk utility. I am pretty sure you will have to reset the MBR for the disk. Once you do either the disk will show up and you can initialize it.

 

Can you get bios updates for the 16F2 machines?

 

Yes we have the bios and firmware for the barebone units. If you need them email me and i can send you them.

 

Robm - I thought that might be a part of it, but I wanted to keep the image on the HDDs until I was sure the SDD would work. After I posted last time, I took one of the RAID drives and hooked it up to a USB enclosure and wiped the drive and then formated it. No problems using the drive through the USB enclosure. Initialized, reformated, OS recognized it. All was well.

But when I put it back in the laptop the same problems. Boot up went slow, no HDD, and the disk manager would give an I/O error when I would try to initiliaze the drive.

I can see the two different BIOS sets on the MSI site, but my first attempt to make a boot USB for a bios flash failed. The information link on the MSI bios page is broken and the other MSI information I found was woefully out of date. Anybody have a good link for the USB boot?

Thanks.

 

I started another thread with my problem and through some helpful comments I have resolved my issues.

For anyone interested.... http://forum.notebookreview.com/msi/601737-gt683r-2x500-mb-raid-1-ssd-1-hdd-2.html#post7798353