No HDD light w/RAID?

[SanDiegoPC]

Just used my first MSI board for an i5 system. I've got a pair of 1TB Western Digitals configured RAID 0.

The computer runs great - in fact as good as this i7 system I am typing on but with snappier HD access. The only complaint is there is no HDD light working. I rechecked all the front panel connections and all is well.

Is this normal? And why does it show 2TB of space? I thunk RAID zero would display total space of one drive... not the combination of both.

 

[mrblotto]

RAID 0 offers no redundancy, simply put RAID 0 adds drive sizes together (3 1TB drives in RAID 0 is approx 3TB, 8 500G HD's in RAID 0 is approx 4TB, etc. As for the HD light, try turning the connector around, or you may have to plug the HD connector onto the pins on the HD itself (if there are any).
Good luck

 

[Zap]

RAID1 would have redundancy and show 1TB space. RAID0 increases performance and combines capacity.

What motherboard model and which ports are you using? Some boards have third party controllers for additional ports, and those may or may not be hooked up to the LED output.

Also, have you flipped the connector around? Try the HDD LED on the power LED connector to make sure the LED isn't dead (and vice versa).

EDIT: DOH I type too slow and mrblotto beat me to it.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Not interested in redundancy but speed of access is critical. That's the reason I chose RAID 0.

It's an MSI GD65 (P55 chipset) and the ports I'm using for the drives are the white ones separate from the rest of the SATA connections. The RAID controller onboard sees the drives & sets the RAID up just fine. I'm surprised though that it shows twice the space in Windows7.

No I didn't flip the connector around...good suggestion. I'm very anal about minutia sometimes and when I wired it up I paid attention to polarity on all those little connectors. Maybe I need to forget that and 'just do it' which is what I do on my personal computers all the time and never have problems! This one is going to a good customer and I'd like to get the light working lest he ask me why it's not

 

[Zap]

Not interested in redundancy but speed of access is critical. That's the reason I chose RAID 0.
...I'm surprised though that it shows twice the space in Windows7.

Sounds as if you don't quite understand how RAID0 works. ^_^

RAID0 stripes data across multiple drives without redundancy, thus you get the capacity of multiple drives. This also helps increase the transfer rates, for a performance gain of some kind.

RAID of any kind arguably does not reduce access times.

Is capacity critical? If it isn't, then a single SSD will totally destroy a pair of hard drives in RAID0, even if you were using VelociRaptors. It will offer the transfer rates of HDD RAID0, while offering near ZERO access times.

As for your problem of no HDD LED functionality, only thing I can suggest is to swap the positions with the power LED to see if the problem follows the LED or the motherboard pins.