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SSD on a SATA PCI controller

BTRY B 529th FA BN

BTRY B 529th FA BN

Lifer
I need to free up some SATA ports and I've thought to try my SSD boot, and storage drive on my PCI Rosewill RC-222 Raid Hot swappable controller card. The system booted up fine, but when I ran Samsung Magician it didn't recognize the Samsung SSD.. is it a bad idea over-all having the main boot drive on a controller card?

EDIT: Would it cause the main boot drive with it's OS on it to be asked to 'Activate Windows' ??? the installation was about 2 yrs ago, ???
 
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As a RAID one, you need to install the card alone, and then flash it to the base firmware. Or, if you're on Windows Vista or newer, just get the reference base driver. You can find them here:
http://www.siliconimage.com/support/

With the base firmware, it will support ODDs, and just expose the disks, rather than have any RAID setup.

But, just to keep your sanity, don't put your boot drive on the card. Use the card as your extra SATA ports for devices that don't need speed, like 5400 RPM HDDs, old HDDs, ODDs, etc..

Such hardware changes can trigger deactivation, but you can just re-activate. You're fine as long as you don't change mobos w/ an OEM license.
 
Cerb said:
As a RAID one, you need to install the card alone, and then flash it to the base firmware. Or, if you're on Windows Vista or newer, just get the reference base driver. You can find them here:
http://www.siliconimage.com/support/

With the base firmware, it will support ODDs, and just expose the disks, rather than have any RAID setup.

But, just to keep your sanity, don't put your boot drive on the card. Use the card as your extra SATA ports for devices that don't need speed, like 5400 RPM HDDs, old HDDs, ODDs, etc..

Such hardware changes can trigger deactivation, but you can just re-activate. You're fine as long as you don't change mobos w/ an OEM license.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the great reply! I'll have to look back at it again to understand some of it.

I just put the Boot drive back on the board SATA port and Windows said it was Activated.

I actually use an app to raid my storage drives. The RC 222 is just there for extra ports. I have a total of 10 drive devices, 2 SSD, and 8 large capacity drives and the motherboard only offers 6 onboard SATA 3 ports.. so I'm kinda figuring out how to best set this up again for the second time.. suggestions welcome 🙂
 
If you're using a pure software RAID, instead of their flakey implementation, you're ahead of a lot of users, anyway. AMD's and Intel's FakeRAIDs are OK, but it only took one failed RAID 1 for me to rule out every using the Silicon Image FakeRAID again. They're fine SATA host controllers, though.

Usually software RAID has the RAID info on the drives, so after you flashed the card to base, you should, at worst, have to point it to the drives on the card as RAID members, assuming it's good software RAID. Just put the big slow HDDs on the card, as needed, and leave the SSDs on Intel ports, and you should be fine, at least as far s being oeprational.

If you need decent performance, however, get a non-RAID Marvell or LSI PCIe card (used LSIs branded by big vendors can be found cheap, but you have to cross-reference HBA v. RAID models). The downside to you setup will be that all device on the card will share 133MBps simplex between them all.
 
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