Need help with RAID 0 Disappearing in HTPC - Win7 Ultimate
#1
I was looking for help with a problem that ive been dealing with for some time now and I cant for the life of me figure out what is going on with this.

To give you a little background about my setup the computer is a HTPC that I building using a ZOTAC IONITX-F-E Intel Atom 330 (1.6GHz, dual-core) NVIDIA ION Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo with a bluray player and a storage system of one 320GB system os drive and 2 - 2TB drives in a RAID 0 using a SYBA SD-LP-PEX2IR PCI Express Low Profile SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card which uses the Silicon Image 3232 Raid Controller software.

And now the problem that Ive been having, for some reason the raid will not appear within Windows 7 Ultimate neither in the Device Manager, Windows Explorer nor the Disk Management. The way it happens is interesting what will happen after a fresh install of Windows I will not have any problem seeing the RAID but over time the RAID will slowly disappear. What I mean by that is that after a while of using the HTPC it will take several resets before the RAID will appear in Windows and I can use it. Currently at this very moment the raid has done its disappearing trick again last night I was getting slow transfer performance from the RAID so I canceled the transfer and figured Id try today well now I cant get the RAID to appear at all now and this is not the first time this has happened.

The weird part of it all is that

1) The BIOS for the RAID Controller can see the raid just fine
2) The Controller settings in Control Panel show both of the HDDs as enabled for the RAID
3) The RAID controller in the Device Manger is present and working
4) The individual HDDs are not showing up under the Disk Drive section of the Device Manager

Some of the things I have tried to fix the problem

1) I have update the controller card drivers and bios to the latest offering from silicon image
2) I have updated the firmware for the HDDs if there were any
3) I have replaced both of the drives but this has happened even with the new replacements so it cant be the drives.
4) I have moved the raid from the addon card to the motherboard sata connections and the same thing happens so which leads me to believe that it is something within Windows that is causing the problem.

Im at a lost for what the problem could be this has been at least the 4 time this has happened since Ive build the htpc which now has me looking for building a NAS but thats another discussion if anyone can provide me some suggestions or help me with this problem I would greatly appreciate it.

I know that this is not really a technical support site but seeing as this purpose of this box is to run xbmc and the awesome work Ive seen done here I thought I ask anyway.

If you need any more additional information please let me know.

TIA
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#2
That's certainly a bit weird, esp the way it seems to degrade.

Try live booting a linux distro to confirm that the problem is in Windows.
Asus AT5IONT-I in an A+ CUPID-3 + 2TB Seagate LP + 16GB SSD + Ubuntu + Samba + XBMC

AT5IONT-I Problems? Check out my Motherboard I/O Map for troubleshooting tips.
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Need help with RAID 0 Disappearing in HTPC - Win7 Ultimate0