New mobo SATA woes

[Randell Floyd]

Just bought a new A8N-SLI Premium.

Now I have 6 HDD, 1 IDE, 4 SATA and 1 SATA II.

The four SATA are all on SATA ports, so the SATA II has been put on the slots that are SATA_RAID 1/2/3/4 ( its in 1 ).

Now after pressing F4, I've low level formatted the drive, then selected new RAID, then JBOD. Now I can't seem to do anything after choosing the drive size.

The only options that work are either fully exiting the screen and then into POST, or esc and back to the RAID options.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here, just want the drive as a normal data drive, no RAID etc.

Have the Nivida 6.66 installed and Silicon Image SATA Controllers in windows.


Any idea what I need to do to see this drive?

[Artic_Kid]

I'm still sketchy on the details, but I just today learned that some (all?) boards using the nVidia SLI chipset have only one SATA RAID controller through that chipset. The second SATA RAID controller (if any) is routed through the old PCI bus, which substantially limits the bandwidth to those drives.

In other words, one of the SATA RAID controllers ends up being a lot faster than the other, so you may want to take this into account when you decide which drives to hook to which controllers.

Since you have four SATA 1 drives, you might want those on the faster controller. And your new SATA 2 drive on the slower one. ??? Or the other way around. ??? (I don't have enough details yet to know which is better, I just know there's a difference.)

[Daneel]

Last time I checked, low level formating an IDE dirve was ALWAYS a bad idea. I hope you haven't done any damage.

Do you actually want to set-up a RAID array, or just get access to the drives? I had a problem a few days ago setting up a new SATA drive using the SI 3114 controller. The 2 on the Nvidia controller worked fine but the latest driver for the 3114 just doesn't work.

[Randell Floyd]

Last time I checked, low level formating an IDE dirve was ALWAYS a bad idea. I hope you haven't done any damage.

Do you actually want to set-up a RAID array, or just get access to the drives? I had a problem a few days ago setting up a new SATA drive using the SI 3114 controller. The 2 on the Nvidia controller worked fine but the latest driver for the 3114 just doesn't work.

Just want to get access to the one drive.

[arthurleung]

You don't need to do anything to run 1 drive.
Just keep going and the system will treat it as 1 drive.

[Daneel]

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=53185

That was my thread and how I solved the problem. Your mobo is different but it will probably be a similar process.