What just happened?

[armand]

Even if this is a Mac favored forum I hope to get an answer.



My old computer had an SSD as a primary drive, 2 Crucial SSD 960 GB in RAID 0 (set on the motherboard, an Asus P5Q Pro) and a secondary HDD.

I just updated my computer and I changed the hard drive configuration:
- a new SSD as a system drive, with a new install of Win 8.1 Pro
- the 2 Crucial SSD (the new motherboard, an Asus Z97-Pro, set in AHCI)
- 2 HDD @ 3 TB set in a mirrored volume in Win ( basically a software RAID 1)

To my huge surprise the system is seeing the 2 Crucial SSD as one (I assume it's a RAID 0), including in disk management (where it doesn't seem to say it's a dynamic stripped volume) and the motherboard it's definitely AHCI.
I just can't figure this out. Is it windows who took over? This will hugely increase my respect for the Win 8.


PS. The data seems to be intact

[Alan Goldhammer]

Did you unplug the SATA cables from the all the drives when you did the update?  I don't know about Win8 but with Win7 installations you can get weird drive assignments if you don't do this.  Data is 'usually' not affected but a change in drive assignments of data drives can have an impact upon backups if you don't rename them.  Don't know about your RAID configuration issue.

[armand]

The 2 SSDs had the SATA cables still plugged in but I don't see how this would make a difference as the entire thing is new: new motherboard, new primary SSD, new install of a different OS.
I'm very glad it still sees it but I don't know the mechanism behind and I don't know what to expect in the future.

Again the motherboard is set in AHCI but the windows only sees one drive, so it's unlikely a software RAID from windows, probably some trick from the motherboard's BIOS (same manufacturer, similar series P5Q Pro to Z97 Pro) despite it being set in AHCI.
When I was playing in BIOS it did change on it's own to RAID but I reverted back to AHCI before saving the changes (I think it was happening when I was enabling the Intel Rapid Storage) so maybe it was detecting the previous RAID.

[xocet]

Have you installed the Intel Rapid Storage technology utility? That has some user tools, IIRC, that allows you to change the disk configuration.

I don't see the point in running SSDs in RAID0, unless you really like living on the edge. Set them up as independent drives, or RAID1. Your unlikely to saturate an SSD through the sata interface. If you want a single large fast storage pool, look at Windows 8 storage spaces.

[armand]

I tried enabling it on the motherboard. When I tried to install one of the Intel utilities it was telling me there are no SSDs present 

The initial RAID 0 came from when I was on SATA II.

I was planning on windows storage spaces or software RAID 0 but right now the windows only sees one combined drive, I assume it's a RAID 0 from the motherboard but I don't really know because I don't have it enabled on the motherboard so I'm really puzzled. 
It might be related to the Intel Rapid Storage as I don't fully understand it and the other options don't fully make sense.