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I have an Asus P8Z68-V/GEN3 motherboard. I have a 500GB crucial MX200 SSD with Windows 8.1 installed. I added another 500GB Crucial MX200 SSD the other day. I want to create RAID 0, I know this is scary RAID and accept the risk. I have them connected to the 6GB SATA ports. When I enable RAID in the advanced --> SATA mode screen, the raid utility does not show during post. I don't see press CTRL + I. I do see the RAID option rom enabled in the BIOS. Anyone know what else I can try?

Bryan

You're probably better off leaving it in AHCI mode and striping it (RAID0) in Windows/Linux.

Intel onboard RAID is software RAID anyway, so you don't really gain anything by using the Intel driver instead of your operating system. Leaving AHCI mode is a bigger penalty anyway, depends on the driver/chipset age but I'm not even sure if Z68 supports TRIM in RAID mode yet. It only came about for current chipsets in the last year or two.

If you really want to stripe your SSDs using the PCH, keep poking in the BIOS - it'll be something in there somewhere that's preventing the prompt (reset CMOS if necessary).

Does the BIOS even see the second drive?

I spent more time last night messing with every bios setting trying to get the CTRL + I to show during post. BIOS sees both drives as well as the OS. I even reinstalled windows with the BIOS set to raid mode in the SATA settings. In the BIOS I do see the RAID option rom enabled. At this point I going to abandon trying to setup raid 0. Thanks for replying to my post.

Did you try pressing Ctrl-I even though the message does not display? Just start pressing Ctrl-I repeatedly as soon as you apply power.

Yes, I tried pressing it.

Turning on CSM (legacy bios emulation) in the EFI on my Asrock Z97 Pro3 showed the RAID utility during boot. With CSM disabled nothing showed on boot.

Interesting, I did not see this setting in the motherboard manual. I will take another look. Is their any down side to this?

The only downside would be it taking longer for the board to run through Power On Self Test (initialize.) With CSM disabled the only gotcha would be if you were to try boot a legacy operating system for example Windows XP.

Might be too late here as it sounds like you're going to go in another direction. In any case:

I've hit this issue before. It's usually due to insufficient resources to load the option ROM.

You can try disabling other devices in BIOS (If this board has additional unused JMicron or ASMedia SATA ports, those would be my first choice). Removing any NICs that support PXE boot or disabling PXE network functionality in the BIOS would be worth trying also.

And of course if you haven't already done so, a BIOS update is worth a try.

I can't tell if you've got it figured out or not, but if your chipset controller is in RAID mode and you're able to boot into windows, you should be able to use the Intel Rapid Storage utility (https://downloadcenter.intel.com/search ... %AE+RST%29 ) in windows to add the second drive and create a RAID0 array. You'll have to use diskmgr to expand or create another partition. It's been a while since I've used it, but I was able to create both 2 and 3 drive RAID0 as well as 3 drive RAID5 a few years back but I'm pretty sure the functionality still exists.

Now, you couldn't create Matrix RAID arrays where you would have say, half the capacity as RAID0 and the other RAID1 on the same two drives - I had to use the BIOS utility to do that for some reason.