- Oct 9, 1999
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I recently setup my Haswell-E system. This system includes four 1TB Samsung EVO drives in RAID-0 volume mounted to a directory created on my system drive, a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro. The array was created in the Intel RAID BIOS after enabling RAID operation on SATA ports 0-5. It took 8 hours to transfer 3.5TB to the array from a backup HDD.
I decided to play around with the Gigabyte X99 BIOS to tweak the system. One of the things I did was a BIOS update, which resets settings to default. This sets SATA ports 0-5 back to AHCI. I thought it would be fine to boot off of the sytem drive at default settings and configure the ports to RAID mode later. I was wrong. For some reason Windows automatically configured a single 1TB EVO drive to be volume mounted to that directory. I thought that was odd. After rebooting the system and configuring the ports back to RAID, I discovered to my horror that the array was no longer operational. Apparently Windows had written something to that single drive to volume mount it. I then spent the next 8 hours restoring the backup again.
Why and how would Windows even do this? Is there some way to prevent Windows from doing this again?
Since discovering what transpired I've been disabling those ports alltogether if I'm tweaking setting in the BIOS. Only to enable the ports again for RAID once I have everything configured the way I want.
I decided to play around with the Gigabyte X99 BIOS to tweak the system. One of the things I did was a BIOS update, which resets settings to default. This sets SATA ports 0-5 back to AHCI. I thought it would be fine to boot off of the sytem drive at default settings and configure the ports to RAID mode later. I was wrong. For some reason Windows automatically configured a single 1TB EVO drive to be volume mounted to that directory. I thought that was odd. After rebooting the system and configuring the ports back to RAID, I discovered to my horror that the array was no longer operational. Apparently Windows had written something to that single drive to volume mount it. I then spent the next 8 hours restoring the backup again.
Why and how would Windows even do this? Is there some way to prevent Windows from doing this again?
Since discovering what transpired I've been disabling those ports alltogether if I'm tweaking setting in the BIOS. Only to enable the ports again for RAID once I have everything configured the way I want.