GA-P35C-DS3R RAID -> New Gbyte

[dorsy99]

Tomshardware Fellows,
I have just had a motherboard(?) failure, (At least thats what I believe it to be) and am looking to get a new gigabyte mobo. The problem is I have a RAID-0 array on my old one through the purple Gigabyte SATA ports. If i buy a new motherboard with those same purple ports, am I going to be able to move the raid without losing anything / having to rebuild it?

I understand that it isn't the colour of the ports, more the raid chip manufacturer, but I haven't had enough experience to know if raids will move from one board to another easy.

I have a friend who has the same mobo as my old one, so worst case scenario, i plug the two drives into his mobo, and copy them off onto a couple of terrabyte external drives, but I really don't want to if I can help it...

What do you think?

Dorsy99

 

[howardp6]

If you have the same chipset as your old motherboard, you can just connect them, otherwise you are going to have to reinstall your operating system. What operating system do you have? Windows HP does not have native SATA drivers, so if you are using XP you will have to load the SATA driver by pressing the F6 key and have the sata drivers on a floppy. Windows VISTA allow you to install the sSATA drivers from a USB flash drive. You will have to set the drives to RAID in the BIOS and the RAID Volume should be recognized. If you are installing the OS set you CD/DVD drive as you first boot drive followed by the RAID Volume.

 

[dorsy99]

My OS is on a single drive plugged into the ICH9 chips, so i'm not too worried about that.

I am running Vista x64, but i will probly have to rebuild/repair it i guess.

Probly should have mentioned the raid is just for data storage, so it can be installed later if need be.

 

[bilbat]

If you post your current motherboard number, I can search for currently available boards that will not disturb your RAID; on the other hand, you might want to do a rebuild with the new system, if you move your RAID to the ICHxR, it will be 13 - 15% faster, as well as more robustly supported - the Intel 'drive watcher' utility is great...

 

[dorsy99]

TBH, Speed isn't an issue. I just use it for storing movies and ISO files. My old board is a Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R and i'm looking at going to a GA-EP45-DS5. I guess the ICHx would be cooler... but again, not worried.

 

[bilbat]

Well, Gigabyte is making this nearly impossible; for most of their MOBOs, though the marketing blather calls the secondary ports GSATA, somewhere in the docs, you can find the jMicron number (far as I know, all the 'GSATAs are actually jMicron controllers); not so for the EP35C - by comparing driver revision numbers at jMicron, I found out it is from the 36x family; then, I can't find your desired board at their search page:
http://www.gigabyte-usa.com/Products/Motherboard/Products_List.aspx?VenderType=Intel&CPUType=socket+775#Intel%20X48
Finally rooted it out (BTW - that looks like one hell of a good MOBO!), and it uses the same driver series (though, un-understandably, an older rev) so I'm assuming it also uses a 36x chip - if it were a 38x, the driver series would be 1.00.xxx... Should be good to go!

 

[dorsy99]

Awesome! Thanks heaps for the info. I did some looking and found the jMicron before, and something about Sil5xxx chips in the new one, but couldn't google much more from that.

Thanks again. And yeah, I'm looking forward to upgrading

-Dorsy99

 

[bilbat]

something about Sil5xxx chips in the new one

If you'd be so kind as to provide a pointer to this info, I'd love to take a look at it... I am pretty confident thsat you'll be OK though - the format of the revision numbers for the drivers is 'fussy' enough to be pretty much unmistakeable... Why the driver for the new board is an older one than the one for the old board puzzles me, but I've never had any troubles with keeping the driver set updated off the jMicron website:
ftp://driver.jmicron.com.tw/

 

[dorsy99]

http://www.computeralliance.com.au/parts.aspx?qryPart=9431 is probly where i will buy from ($AUD, so don't scream at the price), if you check it out, it says "2 x SiI5723 chips (Smart Backup): -4 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (GS0-Source, GS1, GS2-Source, GS3) supporting up to 4 SATA 3Gb/s devices - Support for Smart Backup (RAID 1)"

 

[bilbat]

Well, I can't yet report a lot of progress for you - but I was right, I have, so far, enjoyed looking! Rooting around at SiliconImage found a whole, involved, mutiply nested documentation structure - which as far as I can find, doesn't have their current chipsets, and is a batch of empty pages! There also appear to be some drivers, but the naming format doesn't come even close to what I found at GB for the newer board... I may have to pass this question along to Janus Yeh at TweakTown for verification and advice. The thing that I found fascinating, was a pointer at SiI that led me to the The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO):
http://www.serialata.org/
the group responsible for developing, managing, and driving adoption of the Serial ATA specifications. They have a web-site chock full of absolutely riveting documentation, of every level of technical sophistication conceivable, regarding the past, current, and future details of SATA, including draft specs for the next standard, SATA3! This'll satisfy my "I wonder why they...?" reading needs for, oh, about three days or so... Thanks for the adventure!

Bill