P5B-Dx & RAID Options

Hi2all!

I recently put together a new rig with ASUS' P5B Deluxe/Wifi-AP (see sig). On my older rig, I used an external RAID controller (PCI add-on) and even managed to move an already-installed instance of XP to a RAID 1 configuration on this ext. RAID controller.

When I went to install a fresh copy of XP on the P5B-D, I left the Intel Matrix Storage Manager (MSM) BIOS settings to the default of "IDE" as I decided I only wanted to mirror my data drive this time around. The secondary on-board RAID controller (JMicron's JMB363) was also set to "IDE" by default which was fine by me as I'm only using it for my PATA optical drives.

Given the above "default" settings, the JMicron controller's RAID BIOS Utility is automatically enabled (ctrl-J to access & visible just after post) and the MSM's "Bootrom" (ctrl-I to access) is not enabled.

After installing the OS, I went ahead and changed the MSM option from IDE to RAID and was (of course) upset when MSM's RAID BIOS Utility screen did not appear. I when ahead and enabled the sub-option "onboard serial ata bootrom" - despite the BIOS' own warning/tip that I should avoid enabling this if I only plan to mirror non-OS drives (due to limited ROM resources). Finally, MSM's RAID BIOS Utility screen appeared but the system could no longer detect an installed OS...

Reading the p5B manual (p. 5-30, English ver.), it bluntly states that I have to select sub-option "onboard serial ata bootrom", and goes ahead to describe the various RAID modes, but nothing about having to perform this prior to installing an OS - regardless of which drives you plan on mirroring.

So here's my concern (finally): why do I have to predetermine how I want to configure OS-independant data drives prior to installing the OS? this is crazy because if you decide later on to go from say, a RAID configuration to AHCI mode (for the data drives), you would have to re-install the OS and thus, all your applications...

Is this really the case, or did I miss something...? As for the JMicron controller, it only supports one internal SATA and one external so I don't even understand why it offers a RAID option. I'm using the latest 0507 BIOS btw and I have the latest chipset drivers, etc. Note that the Windows-based MSM software cannot be installed if the MSM controller is being used in IDE mode.

Thanks2all for any words of wisdom and/or suggestions on what to do 8^)

Intel's MSM is faster in RAID than in IDE mode!

Hi2all,

looks like either my post was too long to read or no one had any of their own "war stories" to contribute but life goes on and so must I go on with building this new rig

As a sort of side note, I knew that I would ultimately have to go RAID and seeing as I only have three PCI slots on the P5B (anyone actually own a PCI-E 1X, 2X or 4X peripheral... ?), I went ahead and switched the onboard Intel MSM RAID (ver. 6.0.0.1022) from IDE to RAID mode (& enabled the associated Option-ROM). A recent thread, -->RAID 0 Help on P5W DH<-- and an associated post from fritzman gave me even more courage when he reported that there was no need to do a fresh reinstall of XP, just a Repair.

While the P5W has some sort of "EzRaid" feature, the P5B-D has simply Intel MSM with 6 SATA ports, four red (1,2,5,6) and two black (3,4). There is however a reason for this color-coding because when operating in IDE mode, a boot/system drive must use one of the primary (red) ports. This does not hold true for RAID or AHCI but never the less, I connected my system drive to SATA1 (red) and choose SATA3&4 (black) for my RAID 1 data drives.

One iteration of boot-from-XP-CD, F6-load-MSM-Drivers, Install-but-repair existing OS, re-install-security-updates and re-add-coolbits-reg later and I was running in RAID "mode". This time I did manage to install Intel's Windows-based MSM utility and it notified me that my RAID set was in order.
---------------

Of course I wanted to know what the total damage of using Intel's MSM RAID solution would be in terms of performance, not so much for the for the RAID 1 set (which by definition, leads to a performance degredation), but for the non-RAID system drive. So I dilligently ran the HDD tests of -->Futuremark's PCMark05<-- before and after implementing RAID mode.

Imagine my surprise when the results were not worse, but even slightly better than IDE mode! Even the RAID 1 set saw some improvements in some areas... ! A few statistics for your reading pleasure (all in MB/s):

System Drive (Seagate 7200.7 120GB), MSM in IDE Mode / RAID Mode:
XP Startup .............. 7.8/ 8.2
General Usage ......... 5.2/ 5.8
Application Loading .. 6.2/ 6.9
Virus Scan ............... 57.9/ 56.9
File Write ................ 55.1/ 56.0

Data Drives (Freshly-formatted NTFS, RAID 1, Seagate 7200.10 320GB), MSM in IDE Mode / RAID Mode:
XP Startup ............... 9.1/ 12.7
General Usage ......... 5.5/ 7.6
Application Loading .. 7.0/ 7.9
Virus Scan ............... 95.1/ 86.1
File Write ................ 71.8/ 70.8

It's odd to see that the biggest drop in performance is the Virus Scan test which implies reads and not writes, and less of a performance hit from the File Write test which should be the weakest link in a RAID 1 configuration (go figure...). But aside from this odd result, I am happy to see that Intel's MSM contrlloer does not hamper performance in RAID mode for non RAID 1 drives! I'd also be curious to know what AHCI might bring to the table but for now, I'm done with the boot-from-XP-CD, F6-load-MSM-Drivers, ...etc. but maybe someone not so hell-bent on data mirroring might let us know the answer to that one

I'm a little confused here. You are trying to use 2 sata drives on raid 1? You want to get your raid from your pci card to the onboard MSM raid?

Have you seen this thread. It's really the only way to go for those of us with onboard matrix raid. It is a huge noticable jump in performance.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=467848

hyperasus said:

I'm a little confused here. You are trying to use 2 sata drives on raid 1? You want to get your raid from your pci card to the onboard MSM raid?

Click to expand...

Hi & thanks for both replies, incl. the very interesting thread!!!

Yes, I am using two drives in RAID 1 - mirroring mode. No I am not using Intel's "Matrix" mode - I just want to do a straight forward RAID 1 setup (for now... ).

Hence, I have a total of three physical drives installed - a 120GB for my system drive and two 320GB for my data which runs in RAID 1 mode so that the OS sees only two physical drives, one 120GB and one 320GB drive.

jumpers-away!

hyperasus said:

Have you seen this thread ...http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=467848

Click to expand...

Oh ...o), I installed my pair of Segate 7200.10 320GB SATA drives without even noticing the jumpers, nor the clearly-stated function of said jumpers...

Now that they are configured in 3GB/s mode, my PCMark05 "Virus Scan" results jumped from the above-documented figure of 86.1MB/s to 119.9MB/s... On the flip side, none of the other tests changed dramatically...

In any case, I owe you one for that link - thanks a mil!

slice off a 20 gig section of your raid, or however much you need for windows and all your programs. You will be amazed at how much snappier windows feels afterwards. It's definitely worth the hassle of setting up the raid.