Rebuild Guidance Needed

First and foremost…greeting and salutations!

I’m rebuilding my machine very soon…I upgraded from W7 to 10 and although everything worked, I did “lose” my raid5 setup briefly. I found compatible drivers to get me back but transfer speeds have been just awful. In any case, I think one of my drives is failing and so I’m taking the opportunity to start over. I’m backing up right now (at 20mb/s…uuuuuuggggggh) so while I’m waiting on that, I thought I’d research how best to do the reinstall…which is how I found this place!

So here are the details. My motherboard is an MSI 790FX-GD70…it’s got 6x SATA ports that are controlled by the SB750 chip…My plan is to connect 2x drives (plugged into slots 1 and 2) to run in a Raid0 for the main OS and then use the other 4x slots for a Raid5 setup. The MB also has two JMicron SATA plugs and I’ll be using one of them to plug my bluray drive into.

Ok, so my very first course of action is to update the bios (which I’ve never done) and then create the raids in its setup and then install W10…here is where I am lost. The old manual tells me that I need to provide the proper drivers upon installation for Windows to recognize the raids correctly…I suspect I never set it up correctly in the first place and I’d like to get it right. So which drivers do I need for the initial setup?

Link to the MB if curious: https://us.msi.com/Motherboard/790FXGD70.html#hero-overview

Thank you!

@3rdman :
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!

The latest 32/64bit AMD RAID drivers for your chipset will be the v3.8.1540.14 WHQL ones. Although they have been designed for being used with Win8/8.1, I am pretty sure, that they will work with Win10 as well.
You can find the download links to the mentioned drivers within the start post of >this< thread. Yiouz have to look into the chapter A c).
Don’t forget to unplug all other storage drives (HDDs/SSDs/Optical drives) except the USB Flash drive containing the bootable Win10 image and the target drive (your RAID0 array), before you strart with the Win10 installation. You can reconnect them once the OS is up and running fine.
Good luck!
Dieter (alias Fernando)

Thank you very much for your help! I didn’t know about having everything disconnected while installing so thank you for that as well!

Two more questions if I may: (1) The drivers you pointed to…I assume they should also be used when finally installing the Raid5 array as well? (2) Is it possible to disconnect everything and do a complete reinstall and somehow keep the Raid5 data untouched or am I destined for a formatting no matter what?

Again, thank you for your time!

Yes!

Only the data of the 2 HDDs, which will be members of the RAID0 array, will be lost. Your current RAID5 array and its data should be automaticly accessable after having reconnected the related disk drives.
Nevertheless I recommend to backup your most important data somewhere.

Incredible! Thank you thank you thank you!