RAID when adding second HDD on new Omen 17-CK1000

[Ericon29]

Looking through the forums I recognize this was asked and answered a few months back: for the preceding model with a Gen4 and secondary Gen3 NVME SSD slot - prior to current Omen 17 with 2 Gen 4's. I'm assuming we wouldn't have fewer performance features or at least the same level of feature support.

Here is the link which gave the idea that RAID is available on Omen 17's.  Solved: Add second SSD on HP Omen 17-ck0043ur - HP Support Community - 8443795  --->>> Written in July, but no longer applies to Omen 17t in laptops! There are other links as well as Omens out there configured with RAID (Now if only I could get hands on one of those BIOS binaries...)

So, are the needed features truly disabled or are hidden from us external users/integrators and only available to HP system builders at order time? (Yes, aware of a few other Mod tools and forums to get around this but I'm actually ATTEMPTING FIRST to go through HP channels before voiding warranties etc....). Also, I figure if I resolve this up front then others with less engineering chutzpa might have a chance to follow a simplified resolution. Using the built in RAID supported on the gen 10/11/12/13/14 chipsets is pretty trivial, so why does HP make this hard now? Lock the BIOS if you must but enable this feature on request, easy enough for a RAID patch release. 

I have spent efforts calling HP support since I bought 2 brand sparkly new WD Black 850x 4TB drives and installed. They light up flawlessly I swear I can hear them revving inside there, --- got the stock drive that came out in external NVME case now all booted up (typing this on it) off Thunderbolt 4 port, and the drives invisible to OS (MMC disk manager sees them unpartitioned of course! 4TB ea x2: no need diskpart/format yet as we haven't got them striped together) as I haven't partitioned or done anything, until I get BIOS to pull up the drives first and into a Stripe 0 array. The hope was to simply configure the array then run my recovery disk I made before starting this process.  It simply requires the user to configure a RAID array in the BIOS / RST, so I can start clean install in raid mode

HP support has completely given me a run around from one dept to another, so I turned to the SMART guys on the forums. I appreciate constructive help over snarky critiques - when you spend thousands of bucks for some good "bones" and power limits and then find out you can't drive your car the way you want, well go figure buyers get enraged and turn against the vendor.  

ctrl F11 spam with F10 before boot does pull up a single Advanced tab, I'd put in a picture here if allowed on forum but all it did was allow access to a single PCH Power Slider... AMI Bios F.11

Kindly, awaiting suggestions besides illegally running hex edited mods myself (or my team) on proprietary AMI BIOS for HP. If I do that, I won't need to post in forum to solve this for everyone. This is a major feature that a reasonable expectation exists for HP to facilitate. I'm pretty sure they have, and I could get through Commercial Channel - but again defeats the point of going through this for benefit of non com user base / enthusiasts in our Omen community.   (BIOS patch, key sequence so I can get at the RAID configuration to build it or whatever was hoped for, or some HP vetted / approved solution).  

Thanks, and happy holidays!

nobody important

[TzortzisG]

Hi buddy!

You do realize this is the HP user community, right? That means the community of users of HP products. Not the community of important, unimportant, shady, or whatever CTOs. Nevermind....

That older thread you linked to, it's about the previous Omen 17s, that is the TigerLake ones. Quite a few things have changed. The manual for those models is no longer relevant, and in fact HP has removed the manuals for the 17-c0000 and the new 17-c1000 from their site. As you already know, the new model has 2 Gen4 ssd slots while the previous one had a Gen4 and a secondary Gen3. About the raid, I haven't seen anything from HP officially claiming it DOES have raid capabilities. In fact, it's not sold by HP with dual ssds, nor can it be configured that way. I've only seen some initial reports online and in reviews that since the previous models supported the Raid0 config (even with different gen nvme slots) it should support it now. So I don't know about the deception and the liability you're talking about. One looking into buying one of these laptops and reading the product description on the HP site, might very well assume they don't even have a second storage slot -let alone support raid.

But yes, you're correct that enabling RAID is hidden/locked and enabled in the HP factory when a dual storage config is required. So are options like DIMM timings, voltage control, fan control, etc, etc. These hidden options can be unhidden or modified either with dmpstore or with James Wang's UEFI utility. If you can't do it yourself, you can always post a request on the winraid forum......

If you get anywhere with this, post any helpful info here or on this relevant thread: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/Questions-about-laptop/m-p/857... .

[Ericon29]

Thank you, @TzortzisG for your thoughtful response

Tightened up the OP to make slightly less long winded.

Maybe you or someone else can put an answer to the specifics highlighted in my actual request in this post (for key sequence, or official HP response I may have missed, patch or whatever).

To wit, preferably a solution that won't negate warranties or potentially put user base at a liability (like modding binaries with hex editor myself) or risking bricks from shady mod sites... Something suitable for integration/deployments and purchasing across large financial organizations -at scale with uniform and predictable results. 

RES

[Huffer]

@TzortzisG is the bright light here and his analysis is spot on. I'm not going to be snarky or anything but been contributing to the Forum for a couple decades, done some pretty high end hardware configuring in my day, and have gotten to be pretty familiar with what is and is not possible in the HP world. Even though you have a very capable machine there it is still consumer grade and HP just does not provide any kind of assistance with modifications to BIOS or even uncovering hidden options. I suspect RAID capability was intentionally omitted from your model series after finding that it generated too much support traffic in the prior generation. I will empathize that I have often wondered what it would be like to stripe together a pair of NVME Gen 4 M.2 SSDs. A few years back I worked on a custom gaming laptop (not HP) presented by a customer which was capable of a RAID-O on a pair of 2.5 inch SATA SSDs and the boot time was so fast if you blinked you missed it. But he brought it back 30 days later with the RAID broken and no boot. We made it single drive and he never had another problem. 

[Ericon29]

Thanks @Huffer

I've been waiting to play this out before going plan B for me, which is simply dedicate a little bit of an E-Core to run MS RAID via the capable Windows Software Facility. I'd offer this as a solution to my own OP, if you agree. Or you have another workable fix for me to max performance with RAID and mosey on down the road? hehe, -- At least it's a path forward, although I'll have to rig a boot drive in - before OS can run the striping. What do you guys think?

Less Elegant, I admit as a purist --but it's pretty well debugged and there are some advantages (less likely to blow up after 30 days and more reliable/recoverable in my experience, I've had AMD proprietary Mobo RAIDS go south on high end rigs and --not pretty!) so, I also empathize with you and with HP commercial decision makers. This 24-core beast has to do something anyway... Might as well add the raid along with the 411 6G processing and all the other process / threads intel is getting handed. Chip is a beast and can handle more load. The on-board RST loads a TSR driver at boot and runs process resources anyway, so architecturally these solutions are not far apart. Almost worth doing a comparison study, as I haven't seen any properly done online - let me know if you have. 

Nevertheless, this won't make enthusiast grade followers happy ;). I've pushed as hard as I can front channel to advocate what I think is good for users, I'll leave your forum in your capable hands. It may actually be much ado about nothing if I could get hands on RST/RAID in same model then I'd do the benchmarks apples to apples and post. 

Remember, PCIE 5 lanes are also on this mobo traces as well, to at least one NVME as far as I could tell -and always built in to the CPU / address lanes from gen12 and up so the address lines are connected to the mobo and is backwards/forwards compatible as all PCIE. Microsoft's planned new direct memory access architecture for GPU's to Fast DDR5+ ultra speeds (bypassing OS almost entirely, pretty amazing tech in action) are already here.  Really uses up those 64 channels/lanes fast! I was looking to bake in house systems that could handle tremendous loads for VR apps we're developing. Whatever we build or cobble together the dev's will always find a way to use up!

Cheers,

RES