# New HDD showing up in BIOS but not Windows?



## Wastedslayer (Jun 10, 2010)

Just bought a 300GB Raptor to put my games on. The BIOS shows the drive and Western Digitals little diagnostic service shows the device as well but it will not show up in my computer. SMART test shows the drive is functioning properly.

System Info:
MSI 790FX GD70
2x500GB WD Black (Raid 0)
1x300GB WD Raptor

Any help is appreciated.

Wasted

P.S. I also noticed on the WD Diagnostic my RAID is showing up as IDE, i think i saw a setting in the BIOS to change that to SATA, will that do anything?


----------



## cadaveca (Jun 10, 2010)

Controlpanel>computer management(from administrative tools)>disk management>rightclick drive>activate.

















*MAKE SURE ALL DISCS LISTED AS ONLINE, MOST LIKELY THE DISC IN QUESTION IS NOT*


----------



## Wastedslayer (Jun 10, 2010)

What Cluster Size should I use? Only storing games on it?

EDIT: Thanks for Images


----------



## cadaveca (Jun 10, 2010)

use the "default". others may be faster, I suppose, but they have defaults for a reason, so unless RAID'ed, I don't bother changing allocation size.


----------



## Wastedslayer (Jun 10, 2010)

Whats a good allocation size for my raid then with Windows and mainly all other files on it? And can you read my P.S in the original post about my RAID. Appreciate all the help cadaveca.


----------



## cadaveca (Jun 10, 2010)

To be honest, it seems it kinda depends on what controller, and the RAID type.

But I don't know what's best, really, I usually use 64k or 128k, depending on the overall RAID size. Alas, I am no expert when it comes to drives...but I could give you manual settings for your ram! 


I guess that's something I should brush up on, been a while since I even considered anything with RAID, other than short-stroking(smaller partitions at front) the drives.


----------



## brandonwh64 (Jun 10, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> To be honest, it seems it kinda depends on what controller, and the RAID type.
> 
> But I don't know what's best, really, I usually use 64k or 128k, depending on the overall RAID size.



yea i used 128K on my raid 0 setup and it runs good.


----------



## Wastedslayer (Jun 10, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> To be honest, it seems it kinda depends on what controller, and the RAID type.
> 
> But I don't know what's best, really, I usually use 64k or 128k, depending on the overall RAID size. Alas, I am no expert when it comes to drives...but I could give you manual settings for your ram!
> 
> ...



I do love manual settings , what do you need to know


----------



## cadaveca (Jun 10, 2010)

Mem depends on the IC on the sticks, and the chosen platform.


----------



## mlee49 (Jun 10, 2010)

The higher the stripe the lower the overall capacity of the array; but performance will be increased. 

You can leave the HDD config to RAID, it may show up as IDE under that and its fine.


----------



## Hockster (Jun 10, 2010)

Wastedslayer said:


> Whats a good allocation size for my raid then with Windows and mainly all other files on it? And can you read my P.S in the original post about my RAID. Appreciate all the help cadaveca.



Cluster size doesn't really matter. Or it does. Opinions vary to the extreme of both ends. Google and do a ton of reading.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/244059-32-raid-cluster-size-change

There are just as many opinions on Stripe size. Really, best thing to do is just test on your own hardware. But generally don't expect more than a 5% improvement uness something is drastically off with the current setup.


----------



## Wastedslayer (Jun 10, 2010)

Alright, thanks everyone for the information! Hope this thread helps someone else as well.


----------



## hellrazor (Jun 10, 2010)

I always hate having more than 16k cluster size on partitions that have Winblows on them (so many < 1k files!), but I don't have a RAID setup or 1300 GBs to waste.


----------



## Lionheart (Jun 15, 2010)

Thanyou for this info, it also helped me out to cadaveca, cheers bro


----------

