BIOS, RAID and AHCI question

Chris Wilson · 10 May 2015 at 13:10

I wanted to be able to hot swap drives, on a Gigabyte GA-Z97-GAMING 3 M/B. Seems the Gigagbyte BIOS has 3 SATA MODE SELECTION options:
IDE, AHCI and RAID. It was set to RAID, which makes sense as the D drive is a pair of matched SATA III drives in a RAID 1 pairing. C drive is an SSD with the OS on it. However this option doesn't seem to allow hot swapping, even though all drives are set in the BIOS with hot swapping enabled.
Setting the SATA MODE SELECTION parameter to AHCI doesn't allow booting, and I am afraid of enabling AHCI in the registry in case "something bad happens" to the RAID. What will happen if I both set AHCI in the BIOS and set the Win 7 64 bit registry for AHCI? Will the RAID1 Intel Rapid Storage Technology software RAID 1 pairing still work, and will I then have hot swappable drives? Thanks.

wazza300 · 10 May 2015 at 13:15

I don't hink it will work,raid spreads the data across multiple drives so if you remove a drive it wont work

ahci is needed for hotswap as I use it myself to swap hdd's

its either raid no hotswap or ahci and hotswap

it might let you if the drives your attaching/removing arnt part of the raid array have you tried that? just connect a hdd

Chris Wilson · 10 May 2015 at 13:26

Even with RAID 1 (mirror)? I wasn't intending hot swapping a RAID 1 drive, I guess I could set those two drives to no hot swap in the BIOS? Thanks for the reply, seems a grey area!

wazza300 · 10 May 2015 at 13:27

yeah you can select each sata port to hotswap or not

APM · 10 May 2015 at 19:05

I think you may need to re install your OS if you swop the function from RAID to AHCI in the BIOS,don't know your mobo though.

Have you got a back up of the RAID drives?