Using the Marvel SATA controller on ASUS P52 Premium

[Guest]

How do I make use of the the secondary SATA controller on Asus P5Q Premium?

This motherbord has two SATA controller:
Southbridge ICH10R
6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports Intel® Matrix Storage Technology Support RAID 0,1,5,10

Silicon Image Sil5723 (Drive Xpert technology)
4 x SATA 3Gb/s (orange and blue)

I can not find any information in the BIOS for the Sil5723 controller. Can I use this controller to connect my operatingsystem hard drive? When I tried it did not find any hard drive.

The only configuration for hard drives in the BIOS is for the Intel ICH10R SATA controller.
I was planning to use this controller for my RAID storage and keep my operatingsystem hard drive seperate.

 

[chinh_n]

try looking in bios under advance>onboard device configuration

 

[Guest]

The only settings I could find there was to enable or disable the Marvel IDE. I have already tried this.
When it is enabled I get the following message during boot:
Initializing.....
Adapter 1
Disk information:
No hard disk is deteced!

Anyway, as I understand the manual it seems like the Marvel IDE settings is for the onboard IDE connector for Ultra DMA 133/100. The only thing I could read about in the manual for the Sil SATA connector is for use with EZ Backup and Superspeed.

 

[TheDraac]

The orange and blue DriveXpert SATA connectors are for RAID drive setups. You can not use those for bootable system drives. Although I think you can use them as regular data drives in a non RAID setup.

Why exactly are you interested in using those connectors anyway???

 

[TheDraac]

Under the BIOS Tools Menu... you'll see the settings for the TWO Drive Xpert controls.

Drive Xpert Control : Orange and White E1 & E2 SATA ports
Drive Xpert Control 2 : Blue and White E3 & E4 SATA ports

You need to install the Sil drivers in Windows to use those drives.

 

[Guest]

I am using Linux as the operating system. Since I want to keep my system hard drive and my storate hard drives seperate I'll just have to purchase an extra SATA controller to plug into the PCIe x4 slot..

The motherboard SATA controller can be configured in the BIOS, but how would I configure an PCIe based SATA controller (with hardware based RAID)? Could this be done in the BIOS with an software upgrade?

To bad I can not use the one of the Drive Xpert SATA connectors. It will then be little use for the onboard SATA controllers except for the operating system hard drive.

 

[Guest]

Can not edit without registering. The second line has a type error where storate should be storage.

Anyway for the time being I'll just have to keep my drive on the same controller. The PC is a file server/NAS and I would not feel comfortable with the storage devices on the same controller as the operating system disk drive. I.E. to reduce single point of failure.

 

[TheDraac]

As for your NAS setup.... have you considered using an IDE to CF card adapter and running the OS (FreeNAS I believe) on a CF card. Won't have a hard drive to die, add heat and use extra power. Then you can use the SATA ports for storage only.

As for the Sil ports, you might get those to work if you can find the needed Linux driver.

As for the add in card, any set up of that device would be from it's own BIOS. Usually it will flash on the screen when it's detecting what drives are connected to itself.

See adapter here: http://cgi.ebay.com/DUAL-IDE-BOOTABLE-TO-COMPACT-FLASH-CF-CONVERTER-ADAPTER_W0QQitemZ290325712977QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCA_Cables_Adapters?hash=item4398c2d051&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A12|66%3A2|39%3A1|72%3A1205|240%3A1318|301%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50

This is not an endorsement.... just showing the adapter I'm talking about.