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I have spent the last 3 days banging my head against a wall trying to get a RAID 1 setup working on my Windows machine. I have finally gotten the hardware RAID drivers setup (loaded them during an OS reinstall), and have partitioned my two drives for the RAID in my BIOS raid utility.

I booted up Windows and noticed the drives didn't show up. Duh, I need to format them to NTFS.

First I went to the Device Manager and saw this:

Device Manager

Good, the OS sees one logical drive.

Then I go to check it out on the Disk Management tool and it says "Hey this tool can't look at one of your drives until it is formatted. Want to do that now?" I say sure and it is off to the races:

Computer Management

But now I am worried that I am doing something wrong. This utility never said anything about this being a RAID drive. Does it need to know that information? Does the RAID driver on my mobo know to format both drives? I did a full format on them, so I still have a good chunk of time before I get to see the results. But even if nothing seems to be wrong at first, I am worried this will bite me down the road. I am brand new to RAID entirely, so I really have no clue what I am doing here.

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As you already started formatting the drives it would be too late anyway if it was bad. ;)

But you shouldn't run into any problems. Your post suggests you're using a hardware raid controller and as such shouldn't be able to see the individual disks but rather the array you defined on/for the controller. You first screenshots shows that.

The controller should take care of how data is written to the physical disks and your OS shouldn't be concerned with it (if it is a hardware raid). The controller presents the RAID to your OS as a block device and your OS just uses it as one and writes data to it. The controller has the logic to take what's being written to the (virtual) block device and distribute it , according on the type of raid, to the disk.

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The source of your confusion is your hardware RAID. The hardware RAID is initialized in BIOS before Windows boots. The BIOS presents the RAID to Windows as a single volume and that volume is all Windows is aware of. Depending on the drivers/software that comes with your RAID, you may be able to make Windows aware of the individual drives in the array for management. You did everything correctly.

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