Hey Fernando/others, I've recently bought a set of 3 TB 7200.14 Barracuda's with the intention of using them in RAID 0 and doing a clean UEFI install of Windows 7 x64. RAID and UEFI were a first for me and thus far it has been nothing less than a nightmare. The MSI RAID drivers didn't work for example, so I ended up loading the 12.8 RST(e) drivers in Windows setup (after lots of searching). Still, things didn't work, then I booted setup in UEFI mode this morning and things were partitioned fine.

Now for my present trouble. Windows freezes for a while during the logo screen, then boots blazingly fast (RAID does seem to work), only to freeze again when I'm running an installer, and ONLY when running an installer so far. I came across this forum earlier today and thought the EFI SataDriver might help (complementing the 12.8 RST(e) drivers). I opened my BIOS file, an entry was already there, I replaced it, flashed and rebooted. After some strange booting loops and reconfiguring RAID in uefi, things are exactly the same as they were before. I even see the CTRL-I RAID screen (although with pink flickers?), and I think I read that wasn't supposed to be there anymore.

About the MSI BIOS: I can't see an entry for Intel(R) Rapid Storage anywhere. Things are the same as they were. I also don't have a CSM setting or Secure Boot setting, nor Option ROM Messages settings. MSI software has been terrible so far in supporting uefi and RAID but I hope I've missed something here. Where do these freezes come from? How do I enable the SataDriver? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks for your reply! It seems the entry now IS there. Probably a result of me installing the 12.8 driver set through Windows (although the installer said it failed). My freezing problem persists though, so I'll look for more solutions. Can keep this thread updated, because it's an interesting problem at least. The first time I installed the OS on these disks, and found out I had not installed with UEFI, I didn't have this problem. RAID did already work. So it's the combination of RAID and UEFI and probably Windows that's causing trouble here. Still, if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them ;)

Edit: Actually, the freezes are no freezes. It's just that the HDD completely stops showing activity, until a few minutes pass and it just suddenly starts working again. I can move my mouse, but installations freeze and web pages won't load. Some sort of queueing problem?

I'm still trying to fight this and was wondering, when the SataDriver module is active, should you see the Ctrl-I screen? Because I'm still seeing the Ctrl-I screen referring to something like Intel ROM 1.7, yet the module's working fine.

Just tested: the power options don't change anything. HDD activity stops when there's a lot of activity, or some kind of activity, and not when it's idle. My last hope is a firmware update but Seagate made that very difficult with their latest drives.

Can't seem to disable the Ctrl-I message in ClickBIOS, and yes, it's 11.5. Updating the ROM wouldn't have any effect, right?

I'm running it with UEFI. You mentioned before that it wouldn't have any effect, but as the screen shows up, I thought it might be interfering in some way.

Installing Windows 8, I hadn't really thought of that. If it supports UEFI better I'll try it as soon as possible. Cheers!

Haha, installing Windows 8 solved all my problems. I didn't even need to load a RAID driver any more during installation. Definitely a better OS so far, especially with the 8.1 update. Thanks for the help!