SSD + 4 raid 10 drives setup

[sccorell]

I am building the $2500 workstation with some upgrades. This is the 1st build for me in many years and I have never used raid before. The system is running and the ssd is non raid and 4 Samsung F3 1tb drives are set as raid 10 and show as such in setup. The ssd is set as my c drive but I don't see the raid drive in my computer. I thought I was setting the ssd as a boot drive and the raid setup for applications and data but have done something wrong.

How do I get the proper setup so the SSD is the boot drive and the programs and data are operating on the raid drive, or it is better to leave the ssd as a c drive for programs and just use the raid for data? If so how do I get the data to the raid setup?

Thanks

Build
Asus Z8NA-D6C MOBO
2 INTEL E5630 PROCESSORS
24GB PATRIOT VIPERII RAM
NIVIDA QUADRO 4000 VIDEO CARD
INTEL X25 160GB SSD
4 SAMSUNG F3 1TB
LG 10X BLU-RAY OPTICAL DRIVE
CORSAIR AX850 GOLD POWER SUPPLY
CORSAIR 600T CASE2 SUPERMICRO 4U CPU COOLERS
WINDOWS 7 PRO 64

[Andrew J]

You will need to format the drives as NTFS. This can be done through the Disk Management utility.

[sccorell]

Thanks, that worked. What is the best way to get application to load on the raid drive? Change the default in the registry, just pick the drive when installing a program or some way to make the c drive boot only or some other recommendation?

[Andrew J]

Create a folder called Programs or something on the RAID array and when you install it set the install path to that folder.

[sccorell]

I created the file on the raid drive and everything was fine but I didn't have time to load a program. I shut the system down and started it on my return and windows won't boot. For a split second I saw the cpu1 invalid memory configuration message and then the blue screen. This is the 2nd mobo I have used. The first one gave me that msg every time I tried to turn the new build on. After working through tech supprot with Asus they had me rma it back to newegg as a bad memory slots on the board.

Since I am building 2 of these I had a second board and put it in this computer and all was well until now. I have restarted many times and let windows try to fix the problem and it can't. I tried a memory test and it passed. I tried system restore and the restore worked but it still won't load windows. Itried to boot in safe mode, no luck. I just noticed on the choose a recovery tool page windows shows on F: local disk and I had no F drive and windows is supposed to be on the ssd c: drive. What do you recommend I do next?

[sccorell]

With my earlier mobo failure experience, I was looking too hard for a hardware problem and overlooking the possibility of a setup problem. After hours of trial and error I finally figured it out. I reinstalled windows by booting from the installation disk and had all disk set for ide in the bios. I formatted all disk to ntfs, then rebooted and changed bios to raid and set the 4 drives to raid 10. I then rebooted to the windows installation and reinstalled windows changed the raid drive to a dynamic drive and so far so good. I have rebooted several times and no blue screen. All of those steps are probably not necessary but it worked.