Moving RAID.0 array to new motherboard (from Nforce4 Ultra + Sil3114)

luisreg

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Aug 20, 2009
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My MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum is GONE, and I had 5 disks on it:

Disk 1: No RAID - OS - WinXP installed
Disk 2+3: RAID.0 on Nforce4 Ultra MCP controller (onboard)
Disk 4+5: RAID.0 on Sillicon Image Sil3114 controller (onboard)

Questions are:

1- Anyone knows if ANY CURRENT Nforce/Nvidia motherboards model is RETRO COMPATIBLE with the legacy NFORCE4 controllers (with AMD CPU)?

-> In case not, any solution to access the RAID from the NForce4?

2- Since I think no new motherboards have Sillicon RAID controllers (now have AMD/NVIDIA only), anyone knows any PCI controller to attach to the new motherboard COMPATIBLE with the Sil3114? (I read that the new Sillicon controllers are generally compatible with the old ones), so I can access the Disk 4+5.

Thank you!

Luis :sarcastic:
 

Paperdoc

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Nvidia recently claimed that all the RAID software systems they install in their mobo chipsets is the same, and assured users that newer nVidia chips would handle older RAID disks from their chipsets with no problems. I recently had to test this. I had a RAID1 set running on an Abit mobo with an nVidia chipset and the mobo crashed. I purchased and installed a Gigabyte replacement board with a similar nVidia chipset. When booted, it was perfect - it just booted and ran with no trouble at all! That includes actually booting from the RAID array - there are no other disks or bootable media in this machine.

Check the nVidia website on this for latest details, but it worked perfectly for me.

I don't have any info to help on the Silicon Image controller question.
 

luisreg

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Aug 20, 2009
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Thanks!!! thats reassuring! since I'll do this:

1- For the Nforce4 array: Nvidia offical tech support said that all new NVIDIA RAID controllers (both NFORCE/GEFORCE) are backwards-compatible with legacy controllers like the NFORCE4 Ultra I had, so in theory, a new one should "understand" the RAID array coinfiguration metadata stored on the disks, and no information would be lost. This is as long as the RAID BIOS version of both old and new MB is 9.xx...

So in this case I'l buy a new MB with a Geforce 8200 chipset (ASUS M3N78-VN with a Phenom II 710).

The only worry is how to verify WHICH RAID BIOS version I had on the defunct MB... any idea? Is the RAID BIOS inside the MB BIOS?

2- For the Sil3114 array: I'm buying a Lycom ST-127 PCI host and connecting it on the Geforce 8200 new MB, which essentially contains the same chipset brain as the original Silicon Image 3114 I had on the MSI MB.

In this case, I'd have the same logic controller for that array...

Any thoughts? I'll keep you posted!

Thanks,
Luis
 
I had the exact same board a while back, MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (Athlon X2 4400+ toledo). It just died last year. I can tell you that upgrading the bios also updates the raid bios on the Nforce4 raid controller. If you know what bios version you had, you may be able to find it on NVidia's web site. The changelog/readme file used to list the raid bios version. I don't know if they still list it that way, but they used to.