Please excuse my post if rules require such posts elsewhere. It’s been six years since I last bought a laptop. So, I’m a little rusty on configuration.
My last laptop had two drive bays; its BIOS supported RAID. The new laptop (Dell Inspiron 17 5759) appears to allow me to swap out the optical drive for a SATA device. So, I consider replacing the optical and hard drives with two identical SSDs. However, my BIOS does NOT appear to support RAID. The chipset is Intel 100. Dell provides the current driver under version 14.5.2.1088 and identifies the controller as "Intel(R) 6th Generation Core Processor Family Platform I/O SATA AHCI Controller."
Does Intel itself provide a driver compatible with this chipset that supports RAID?
If the BIOS of your laptop doesn’t offer the option to set the on-board Intel SATA Controller to “RAID”, you have no chance to create an Intel RAID array and to use any Intel RAID driver. My suggestion: Run both SSDs as single SATA drives in AHCI mode or create a “Software RAID” by using the related Windows feature.
I was afraid of that. I had hoped that, by placing two identical SATA devices in the laptop, the BIOS might show RAID options. Now it shows no such option. So, I’m “stuck” with AHCI.
In the past, I used RAID0 for speed purposes. My sense is that a software-based RAID solution won’t – if it even exists – provide the speed that hardware would. I do see that prior versions of Windows had drive mirroring which sounds more like RAID1. Since the machine in question is a laptop where all the personal files are sync’d to the Cloud, I don’t see the point in mirroring.
