AMD/ATI SB600 RAID problems

[photographer]

I've screwed up. Someone told me how good Gigabyte boards are and I wanted to get one to replace my Asus M2N-E as my system had been having memory errors since I upgraded the total RAM to 4GB of Super Talent DDR-II 800. I thought that the low voltage (1.95v) capability of the Asus board might be responsible but I eventually found out that it was just a heat issue. Prior to figuring this out, I bought and installed a Gigabyte GA-MA770-S3 which appeared to be comparable to the M2N-E in that it has similar features. I set up a RAID on 2 x 250 GB SATA drives and installed Vista x64. I then connected the two secondary drives and rebooted the system. Neither drive was detected in Computer Management/Disk Management though both were listed in the RAID BIOS. I didn't see any way to initialize them in the RAID BIOS and there are no instructions for this in the manual. Anyone else run into this similar issue ?

By the way, don't even bother with Acronis or other utilities on this board with RAID enabled as they won't work. I tried it with both 10 and 11 and both crash and reboot the system.

 

[Ancalagon_uk]

When you changed motherboards, did you reformat the drives and recreate the array? Because your old array wont be able to read by your new motherboard.

What exactly is the problem though? You say that you managed to install Vista x64 on the array - what isnt working?

EDIT: Oh, you mean your primary array is fine but your secondary drives arent picked in Windows? Make sure they have RAID disabled on them. Dunno.

 

[photographer]

Yep, used KillDisk to scrub each drive clean, rebooted to the FastBuild utility and created the array, rebooted and installed Vista x64. Found that Vistas audio subsystem is completely screwed and that using either the integrated RealTek ALC888 or the X-Fi card that I installed later would cause 50+ % CPU usage. Nothing else running in the background. Note that this does not happen in WinXP x64 where CPU usage is below 1% on average

As to the difficulty with the RAID controller, it doesn't initialize/recognize any drive not setup in a RAID therefore I can't import my data nor can I use a stand-alone internal drive for backup. And there is no way to disable RAID on the specific drives.

EDIT : I normally backup by using Acronis to image my Nvidia RAID on my M2N-E to both a secondary array (RAID copy) and to a keys-witched internal hard drive (data dump as a .TIB file). Obviously data integrity and performance combined to require the "belt and suspenders" approach.

 

[vegettonox]

Ive scanned all over the net on this one. it appears that unless they are defined into a raid array you will not see sata drives anywhere but in the bios once the bios has set sata to be in raid mode. In order to use your secondary drives i would set them up into a separate raid array and then they would be usable or you can get external hard drive enclosures. I originally had a gaming laptop so i had several large external hard drives. i personally have found that having your secondary drives separate is insainly nice and would recommend it to anyone who can do it.


(as a side note) several people have had problems with the sb600 chipset on raid arrays. i had no problems until i installed vista on a raid 0 and the read/write rates were around 4-10 megs a second which really bothered me. I eventually after a few weeks found the new drivers directly from amds website which solved my speed problems and i havent had a problem since. i recommend everyone with installation or operating problems get these drivers directly from amd before completely giving this board the finger considering i havent had a single problem after this.

 

[econcepts]

As to the difficulty with the RAID controller, it doesn't initialize/recognize any drive not setup in a RAID therefore I can't import my data nor can I use a stand-alone internal drive for backup. And there is no way to disable RAID on the specific drives.

I know this thread is old, and will most likely not help the poster but others may be helped by it - all gigabyte with ATI/AMD Raid - enter the raid utility and place the extra drives into a JBOD (just a bunch of disks). One drive per JBOD and the drives will then appear in windows when you reboot.