New to AMD Motherboard.

[FuzijaCZ]

Hello.

Today, I bought a new components for my HTPC and as usual, I went with Gigabyte Motherboard.
This time, I bought an AMD board: GA-F2A88XN-WIFI. Besides the board, I bought a Kingston Fury 120 GB SSD and 2x Seagate Barracuda 3TB disks.
The idea was to use SSD for OS and applications and 2x 3TB HDDs in RAID0 for storage.
I finally managed to put everything together, and I wanted to install OS to it. However, this is where my problems started.
I never actually done SSD+HDD RAID0 on a same PC. I run my main PC on 2x256GB SSD in RAID0 without problem, so I thought, this would be a piece of cake as well. Well, I thought wrong :-(

I need your help please.

I plugged the HW the following way:

Port0 SSD
Port1 LG BlueRay, DVD, CD ROM
Port2 and Port3 Seagate's HDDs

When I choose RAID as controller in BIOS, I can enter the Raid configuration and create an array from disk 2 and 3 (HDDs) but it only gives me 2.1TB total. Also, when I reboot, I no longer see SSD in the list of boot options, therefore, I cannot install OS. I am really struggling here, I have no idea how to make this work. I would really appreciate the help.

On a different topic, I bought Kingston HyperX Savage 2.8GB 2400mhz memory. When I select XMP profile 1 for 2400 settings, the pc won't boot and I have to load bios defaults to make it boot at least to BIOS. XMP profile 2 2133mhz works fine. Why is this happening?

I really hope what I am trying to do here is manageable, because I would really be disappointed if it doesn't work :-(

Thank you for your suggestions and answers.

Thank you in advance.

[dmdilks]

You have to go down to HHD BBS properties and put the SSD the first in that list.

On the memory you will have to OC the CPU a little to get it to the 2400.

Support for DDR3 2400(OC)/2133/1866/1600/1333 MHz memory modules

This will get it so you can put the OS on and than we will go from there. 

[FuzijaCZ]

Hi.

I tried to set it up like this.

Set controller to raid, installed os on SSD disk + drivers. installed 2x 3tb disks, logged to windows, formatted them as GPT and I could see 2x 2.7 TB drives in windows. Then I went to amd-raid configuration by pressing ctrl+r and I already saw there an array with single ssd. However, I left it be and create new array with 2x3tb drives, which only told me 2.1tb. I created it and booted to windows, went to disk management and I converted the raid disks to GPT, but it only gave me 2.1tb as did it in amd-raid configuration. I then tried to remove the ssd drive from raid array, and that made my system unbootable.

What am I doing wrong here? I am going insane already :-(

Now I am trying to install os to ssd by using AHCI as controller and then will try to change it to raid and create the raid0 again, but I am afraid it will again be only 2.1tb. Am I this unlucky or this board cannot create more than 2.1tb raid0?

Thank you a thousands times in advance.

[dmdilks]

If you PM this guy he is the guy that knows array's inside and out. Plus AHCI & Raid are basically the same controller.

http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php?action=profile;u=132428

[FuzijaCZ]

Thanks dmdilks.

I sent the PM to shadowsports, lets see.

I am growing grey hair as we speak :-D

[shadowsports]

I'm working on a reply 

[shadowsports]

Greetings,
dmdilks, thanks for the kind words.


FuzijaCZ,
I have a few thoughts and questions.  What OS did you plan to use?  What BIOS Rev are you running?

F3 offers improved memory compatibility
F4 adds update APU AGESA 1.1.0.2

If you can find a later version, even beta it might be worth considering.  Others here can help with their avaiability.  One word of caution, please ensure the version of your board supports the BIOS rev.  The manual and gigabytes site both say support and features vary by board revision and BIOS. 

Disks formatted MBR only support up to 2.1TB of formatted addressible space unless you create extended partitions beyond the 4 logical partitions supported by MBR.  GPT formatting allows you to utilize the full 2.7TB of formatted capacity.  The legacy RAID Configuration Utility ctrl+r does not appear to support disks >2.1TB.

The board does have a UEFI RAID option that only supports windows 8 x64.  (See page 45 Storage Boot Option Control)  This allows large disk support and booting from darrays >2.1TB.  The downside is that the UEFI RAID BIOS (supported under windows 8 only) has to be loaded/run from a USB stick and configured via command line according to the manuual (See page 53 and later). 

The information provided by dmdilks regarding Boot Order and HDD settings so your single SSD appears as the first boot device is perfect. See page 44 and > for explaination.   

Since you do not want to boot from the RAID, I would install my OS to the single disk.  Then connect the 2 plattered disks for RAID, being mindful that you will need to make changes to BBS settings for the single SSD to appear as first boot device.  Note: the operate mode of the storage controller (RAID, AHCI) should not be changed as you may get undesired results.  I'd set to RAID and load the RAID drivers during OS install with the intend of adding the array later.   

Format the RAID disks in windows as GPT and use the RAIDeXpert2 utility to build the array.  Another word of caution.  RAID 0 offers great performance, but no redundancy.  I would not typically recommend using a RAID 0 for "storage".  I might use it for video editing, but not for data storage.  Regardless of your choice, it needs to be backed up as the hiccup or failure of either disk will cause complete data loss.     Good luck with it