Asus P5Q deluxe: "Drive Expert" function....????

[tigerN4524P]

The Asus P5Q deluxe mobo has six SATA connectors near the front middle of the mobo near one end of the IDE connecdtor.

On the other ends of the IDE connector, there are two additonal SATA ports referred to (page 2-30 of the manual) as "SIL5723 SATA Connectors (7-pin SATA_E1[orange, port0];SATA_E2 [white, port 1]."

These two ports constitute what Asus calls "Drive Expert function."

Seting up these two ports up with hard drives is covered in exhaustive detail in the manaul, except...what they're for. The best I can figure out is that they form a Raid 0 or 1 array.

Can anyone explain?

Thanks,

..
Joe

 

[blacklisted]

As far as I'm aware they're the P5QD's ASUS 'Silicon Image' ports - so basically if you have a SATAII drive plug it in there to ensure you get that 3GBps tranfer rate and somehow a larger cache I think. Didn't read into it too much, just plugged the SATAII drive I had into port0 and got going - works blindingly fast when my P5Q Deluxe and Radeon 4870 stop battling it out and bluescreening.

 

[MaDMagik]

As far as I know they are "normal" sata ports, just served by separate Silicon Image controller, while the other six are operated by the southbridge. And to my knowledge you can set-up raid on either, but i can be wrong