Alienware M17x SSD (SATA III) RAID

After the past several days troubleshooting blue screens in Windows 7on my brand new Alienware M17x R3 machine. I've determined that there is a bug when trying to configure two SATA III SSD drives (OWC Mercury Extreme Pro) or two OCZ Vertex 3 SATA III SSD drives in a RAID configuration. However, I can successfully configure these drives in a non-RAID AHCI format. I can also configured two Seagate Momentus XT (SSD Hybrid) successfully drives in a RAID configuration so I know that RAID works with non-SSD drives. There are a number of forum posts on sites such as Notebook Review with people having similar problems with the Alienware M17x R3 so this is not unique to my computer! Also to set the record straight there was a problem with one of my OWC 6G drives, I tried reconfiguring the RAID when I received the replacement drive. Out of 6 drives only two (non-SSD) drives worked.

Currently I have an SSD boot with a 500GB drive used for data, there was a specific method of installing the drivers from Dell. I will post the procedure here very soon! 

Update on Saturday, October 8, 2011 at 11:33AM by David G (Chuzpah)

After using my SATA III configuration for a few months now and I'm still getting some random BSOD issues with IRQ_LESS_THAN_EQUAL messages. I've decided to rip out the SATA III SSD and run 2 Seagate Momentus XTs instead in RAID 0 mode. This configuration is very acceptable and my system boots in 28.3 seconds! 

Comments

[MHD]

That's a real helpful post, thanks

[David G (Chuzpah)]

Glad you found the post helpful, my goal is provide good technical information based on my experiences.

Thanks,
David