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SATA connectors on 8knxp.

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Carbonlung

Registered
Joined
Sep 6, 2003
Location
ATL
Hi

On the 8knxp mobo, is there a SATA regular connectors? I mean "regular" as in connecting SATA harddrives on the mobo without using a raid controller such as Intel's ICH5R , Gigaraid, and Sil.

One of my harddrive just suffered a S.M.A.R.T event. I contacted Maxtor and they recommended that I connect the drive directly to the motherboard without using any raid controllers. Then run the powermax utility.

With my present configuration, 2 Sata maxtor 160gb HDDs are in raid O array controlled by Intel's ICH5R raid controller. The powermax utility does not recognize drives that go through a raid controller. Any suggestion would be appreciated, thank you.
 
if you're going 2 use xp or 2000, u dont need to use the powermax utility. Just run the windows cd and press f6 to load the drivers for the raid controller and it will format the discs. I personally used the SI image's raid controller. I had a ton of problems at the beginning(constant crashing and blue screens) but after about 3wks, I got all the correct drivers, and it hasn't crashed yet(except for when I do something REALLY dumb).

Tell me how it goes with the Intel controller....
 
Well I got the Powermax utility to recognize one of my HDD by putting it in the Sil controller. I even contacted Gigabyte and they said to convert a SATA controller to a non raid was to not set it up as a raid array. I should have known that in the first place.

My SATAs are still being controlled by Intel's ICH5R. The problem I had with this controller was sometimes it will not recognize one of my drives. I solved that problem by replacing the power connectors to my drive. However, sometimes the raid array will show a "failure" message on intel's raid bios. Its not a big problem, I would just hit
Cntrl+I to get into the intel raid bios setting and the bios will ask if the drives are part of the array. I just answer "Yes" and it will set the array again. Booting is fine after that.

I never had blue screens problem with the intel controller. I'm still using the old drivers that came with the Gigabyte utility CD. The Intel raid bios is the 3.5 version that I had to download before installing XP on my Raid arrary.

The reason that I using intel's ICH5R is because its embedded in the southbrigde. Therefore, is capable of more bandwidth than a PCI interface. Pardon me if cant explain it fully or I'm not using the right technical terms. A review site I cant remember which one, maybe it was Anandtech or Tomshardware that reviewed several raid controllers and raid set-ups. Intel's ICH5R did relatively well compared to the high dollar server type raid controllers.

Thanks for the reply btw. My harddrive still have S.M.A.R.T event message on it. The good news is Maxtor offered me an RMA option without the error code from the Powermax utility.
 
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