Hi All,
I'm having big problems trying to get 2 External Drives configured as
RAID0 via PCIe eSATA card. Not sure if it is something to do with the FreeAgent Drives or something else:
Components
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- 2 x 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Pro External Drives
- SIIG eSATA II PCIe Pro RAID card (provides 2 eSATA ports)
Drives are connected to PCIe card using eSATA cables - Seagate and PC-doctor utilities show both drives 100% operational.
I'm running Vista Home Premium 64 (installed on separate Raptor drive)
All latest and compatible Silicon Image (3132) drivers/bios for the card are installed.
Problem
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During boot up I can set up the drives as RAID0 in RAID BIOS. It boots up fine into Vista.
The SATARAID5 utility (runs from Vista) shows the RAID0 array is set up correctly.
I go into Vista Disk Management and it starts out good:
- I can see the drive (it is identified as Disk2 in my system and shows the expected size).
- I can initialize the drive fine.
- I can create a volume fine.
However, when I try to format it, I get a Disk Management error stating "Format did not complete successfully" and Disk2 disappears from view.
At that point the SATARAID5 utility shows that the RAID0 array has failed (one of the channels is shown as an orphan). When I set the RAID0 array back up and go back into Disk Management, the same happens all over again. Rebooting gets the same results.
By the way, if I have the drives just set up as "pass through" (i.e non-RAID, just separate independent drives via eSATA) they work and format fine?!
I've been messing around for over a week trying to get this thing set up. Something tells me there must be a simple setting I'm missing, but can't figure out what?
Help would be gladly appreciated...
Thanks
