BIOS RAID1, when should it auto rebuild?

[Chris Wilson]

Intel Rapid Storage Technology BIOS RAID1 D drive pairing of 2 SATA III hard drives. Would you expect the RAID to rebuild if both the RAID drives are disconnected with the PC off, then the PC is rebooted and used for a while. Then it's shut down and the RAID1 pairing reconnected? If I do this the RAID is tediously rebuilt, although obviously no data has been read or written from either of the RAID1 pairing. How it ascertains which drive to copy to the other I don't quite know... I am thinking I need to turn RAID off in the BIOS before rebooting with the RAID pair disconnected?? I discovered this when reloading Win7 and wanting to be sure it could *ONLY* write to the C drive, which is an SSD one. Thanks for any insight. OS is Win 7 Pro 64 bit.

 

[rpstewart]

Firstly don't disable RAID in the BIOS - if you do Windows will install with the wrong SATA drivers and the machine will BSOD when you re-enable RAID.

As for the rebuild the controller must be marking the array as offline when the machine is booted without it hence it triggers a rebuild when it comes back. It's likely to be picking the lowest drive ID as "good" disk but that's just a guess.

I think you may just have to deal with the rebuild time unfortunately