VOTED YES...very problematic install Sadly, I have had fewer problems installing the more mature releases of Vista betas than with these latest Win7 releases!
Regardless of what Microsoft may want us to believe, Windows 7 does NOT play nicely with RAID or AHCI setups! Period. It is maddening, but even with Intel's latest "F6" RAID drivers for ICH10R on my brand new Gigabyte EX-58 Extreme motherboard, it was 100% impossible to install Windows 7 RC1 in a RAID 0 configuration on 2 brand new unformatted 300GB Velociraptors. I have scoured MS Technet and countless other forums and it seems no one has an answer to this problem. I wasted more than 2 days trying everything imaginable...but in the end stripped down to a single Velociraptor plugged into the ICH10 without any RAID or AHCI pre-load drivers and only then would Windows 7 install to the drive and complete the install.
Part of the reason I upgraded from my four SATA1 Raptors to these new SATA II Velociraptors was so the storage subsystem would be less of a bottle-neck in my brand new i7 system! Of course, without the option to run RAID 0, the true performance of these drives in this system simply cannot be unlocked. My Windows Experience Index score is a 5.9. REASON: Primary hard disk transfer rate!
WEI looks like this: Processor (not yet overclocked) = 7.5
Memory = 7.7
Graphics (not yet overclocked) = 6.8
Primary Hard Disk = 5.9! THIS IS RIDICULOUS, BUT A SEVERE LIMITATION CAUSED BY INABILITY TO USE RAID 0!!!
I'm not very happy with this RC. To be honest it does not feel as solid as the first beta release I was successfully running on my older dual Pentium system that was setup in a RAID 10, tri-boot environment with XP x86, Vista Ultimate x64 and Win7 x64 beta. Sadly, that RAID configuration was setup using the ICH7R 'F6' pre-load drivers under XP pro and I had installed Win7 into a it's own partition on that array...so perhaps this problem existed then. The problem never showed itself until I attempted a clean install onto a brand new system...never before used drives, no other os, etc. Go figure! You'd think Windows 7 would have been PLEASED to have such fast hardware and optimal conditions for installation. Oh well. (shrugs) Maybe by Windoze 8...9....or more likely 10, we'll actually have a Microsoft OS that will play nicely with RAID configurations! One would think that this issue would be a thing of the past considering all of the work that went into Server 2008--I mean, that's an Enterprise level OS where RAID support is virtually mandatory. It's just very disappointing to know this new OS will roll out this fall and it STILL won't install onto a most basic RAID 0 setup!
My system: GIGABYTE EX58-EXTREME mb Intel i7 920 quad-core processor 12GB DDR3-tri-channel OCZ ram (2) 300 GB WD Velociraptors in RAID 0 configuration Samsung SATA DVD burner Sapphire HD4870 1GB GDDR5 PCIe GPU ((no FDD at all, so using 8GB thumbdrive for F6 drivers)) thanks for the poll...perhaps it could be more specific. Those who had no issues quite likely were not attempting a RAID installation!
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