Mixing RAID and IDE/SATA modes on SB750 on the M3A79-T

[nanohead]

Figured I'd post this, as some folks have had some trouble finding out how to do this. Turns out, you can actually mix devices on the SB750. I've seen lots of reviewers (you know, those sage wise men who know everything) slam the disk handling of the SB750. The vendors suck because their documentation...wait a minute, there isn't any.

Here's what I found on the Asus board at least.

I successfully mixed a single disk (WD Raptor 80G) and a 3 disk RAID 5 array (3x80G seagates) in the same system. I've been able to install both as separate devices. And it appears that all is well, and the whole thing is actually quite convenient

When you set the disk controller type in the main BIOS to RAID, it enables the logical controller in the SB750. Whats confusing, is that if you only have 1 RAID array defined, then the only entry in the "physical disk" category in the BIOS under boot settings are for that array. It also takes away the traditional BIOS main screen display of all your installed disks. Turns out, they move into the RAID option ROM.

I had created the RAID 5 array first, and got that up as a bootable device. But I was able to plug in the raptor, and now!!! lo and behold!! the RAID ROM sees it as a seperate, standalone drive. Not only that...but the MAIN BIOS sees it as a seperated standalone device also, its called something like "RAID Drive Standalone Drive" in the HD list.

I was then able to install Vista onto the standalone drive, while preserving the RAID 5 array.

So now, I've got standalone and RAID volumes. It looks like the RAID option ROM takes over ALL disk control when you set it to RAID, but it synchronizes itself with the regular ROM nicely. You will have to install the RAID/AHCI driver even to use the standalone disk, which is one of the things that confused everyone.

So in the end, you end up working with 2 pieces of firmware (BIOS) to make this work, the primary BIOS for the motherboard, and the RAID option ROM for the SB750. But it all makes sense (which is really amazing)

Windows Disk Management snap-in simply shows both as physical volumes (logical actually) and Device Manager shows them as 2 separate disks, the RAID array and the standalone disk. This is very clever

Hope this helps!!! I was sure impressed!

Now this is a different configuration than what Gigabyte did in their 790GX/SB750 board and even the 780G boards with the SB700. They allow you to assign SATA ports 0-3 to RAID, and 4/5 separately as IDE/SATA. I had thought this was convenient, but now Asus approach here is even more flexible, as you can use any ports for anything.

I hope this explanation makes sense!

[SocketMan]

Excellent find,!
I have the dfi 790gx will try this out (when I get some more drives)



now it's on par with my nf4 expert

[Mathos]

Nice find. I'm personally trying to decide whether I want to get the MSI 790gx board, or the Foxconn. The Asus m3a79-t deluxe looks tempting too. Just not sure about Asus since I haven't used their boards in a while. In fact most of my builds were either Abit, or MSI boards, and the occasional Shuttle Hot board back in the pentium-P3 days, and one bad experience with an FIC board back in the day, and the ASRock board when I switched to AM2. Only problem with the M3a is I don't know if I'll ever use more than 2 video cards. Also thinking about getting an HD4850 to run with the old 3870, let the 3870 pull physics.

[nanohead]

Excellent find,!
I have the dfi 790gx will try this out (when I get some more drives)



now it's on par with my nf4 expert

Hey, let us know how that works out. I'm curious what approach DFI took to this issue. Gigabyte and Asus used different approaches, and I now believe the Asus approach is far more flexible.

How is that board so far?

[nanohead]

I'm in the process of doing another round of testing and general messing around with this setup. It appears to be reliable, but performance is sort of all over the place at the moment. In order to utilize ALL 6 SATA ports of the SB750 for both RAID and regular IDE/SATA, you need to install and enable the AMD AHCI Compatible RAID Controller driver (a new one was posted to windows update 2 days ago!)

I did a semi inconsistent test, with a Raptor 80GB on the SB750/AHCI combo. The one on the left (WD800) are those results.

The one on the right (WD1500) is a RaptorX 150GB on the SB600 bare naked, no AMD drivers on the magnificent DFI M2R

What is interesting is that the SB750/AHCI appears somewhat slower than the SB600 by itself. I realize that the disks are different, and the 150 is somewhat faster than the 80, but note the maximum Transfer rate... it is much different. They are both SATA 1 based, 150GB/Sec, 10000 RPM disks.

We shouldn't take this as gospel at the moment. I want to do a complete disk based apples to apples, 1 with AHCI, then 1 without. Then we will know for sure.

But I suspect there is a penalty/cost for using the AHCI filter driver.

Now I'm gonna built up the RAID 5 array on the same controller, with three new WD 500GB SATA II disks, and test that. Should be interesting.

[SocketMan]

The main selections (in the dfi 790gx) are:
Native IDE
Legacy IDE
RAID
AHCI
+
Option to turn on the "Combined mode" and if that's enabled the second
option is "Primary channel mapping" or Secondary Channel mapping"

ATM I am only using a single sata disk in Native IDE mode however
now (for the second time) something got messed up and the drive speed dropped to a floppy level.It happened before then got "normal" again,but
yesterday after some playing around with it it did it again
Tried all the options and got to a point where I thought the disk went bad -tried it on a different machine (same Winx64 OS -maybe that's the problem)
The disk is fine.The crazy thing is it worked fine with the same options (in BIOS) before -
I guess it's the beta bios,not worried too much about ()

[SnipingWaste]

I have a system with a SB600 with a Raid 1, 200gig HDD, and a DVD SATA burner with out any problems. I don't know why so many are having problems with the SB/600/700/750. The thing you have to do is set the raid up first and after that you can power down the system and add any SATA devices you want.

[SocketMan]

OK. I think I figured it out for the dfi's gx
The 1st 4 sata ports are for RAID/AHCI So if you run a single sata drive use one
of the last 2 sata ports,the first 4 can be set to RAID so you can indeed mix raid
and sata/ide.
It makes sense now.was getting really tired waiting 10 minutes for the Winblows to boot up.Now it's back to 20s

[Darxide]

I'm glad I found this thread, cuz this is the board I want, for the SB750. But I liked how the Gigabyte DQ6 has a seperate SATA RAID controller, away from the southbridge.

Does anyone know if the performance of the ASUS would be affected by placing a DVD drive on the same SATA controller, seeing as it only has the SB750 with 6 ports?

I want to run 2 Velociraptors in RAID 0, with a 3rd HDD, maybe a Deskstar, for storage, and ofcourse, a DVD Burner.

Will all that happily co-exist on the southbridge?

[cbjaust]

I played around with the Drive settings in the BIOS and this is what I found:
Physical Port -> BIOS mapping -> RAID BIOS Mapping
Native IDE; Combined Mode Enabled - Primary:
SATA1 -> IDE2 Master -> N/A
SATA2 -> IDE3 Master -> N/A
SATA3 -> IDE2 Slave -> N/A
SATA4 -> IDE3 Slave -> N/A
SATA5 -> IDE1 Master -> N/A
SATA6 -> IDE1 Slave -> N/A
IDE1 -> IDE0 Master -> N/A
IDE1 -> IDE0 Slave -> N/A

RAID; Combined Mode Enabled - Primary:
SATA1 -> IDE2 Master -> 1
SATA2 -> IDE3 Master -> 2
SATA3 -> IDE2 Slave -> 3
SATA4 -> IDE3 Slave -> 4
SATA5 -> IDE1 Master -> N/A
SATA6 -> IDE1 Slave -> N/A
IDE1 -> IDE0 Master -> N/A
IDE1 -> IDE0 Slave -> N/A

RAID; Combined Mode Disabled:
SATA1 -> IDE2 Master -> 1
SATA2 -> IDE3 Master -> 2
SATA3 -> IDE2 Slave -> 3
SATA4 -> IDE3 Slave -> 4
SATA5 -> IDE1 Master -> 5
SATA6 -> IDE1 Slave -> 6
IDE1 -> IDE0 Master -> N/A
IDE1 -> IDE0 Slave -> N/A

So I was able to get a prior install (from nVidia nForce 570 SLI) working on the 790FX/SB750 board by using the Native IDE setting and then I was able to get the drivers installed by connecting the boot drive to the SATA5 or SATA6 port while enabling combined mode and the RAID BIOS after which I think I was able to boot from the RAID controller (as far as I can remember; don't have the board at the minute because the LAN port stopped working around the same time I was mucking with the RAID BIOS - not convinced the two events are connected as I would have thought the internet would have told me by now if enabling RAID BIOS means bye bye LAN!)

Combined Mode Enabled with Primary or Secondary just flips the mapping of the IDE port between IDE0 and IDE1.

Anyway the thing I was most happy with was that the first option for creating a new logical drive in the RAID BIOS was RAID5! Since there has been no mention anywhere on the DFI site or anywhere else of the RAID5 support from SB750 being intact I was pleasantly surprised because I am sure that on the back of the box it said it had RAID5 support.

Cheers

[nanohead]

I'm glad I found this thread, cuz this is the board I want, for the SB750. But I liked how the Gigabyte DQ6 has a seperate SATA RAID controller, away from the southbridge.

Does anyone know if the performance of the ASUS would be affected by placing a DVD drive on the same SATA controller, seeing as it only has the SB750 with 6 ports?

I want to run 2 Velociraptors in RAID 0, with a 3rd HDD, maybe a Deskstar, for storage, and ofcourse, a DVD Burner.

Will all that happily co-exist on the southbridge?

As far as I can tell, the SATA controller in the SB750 has the mojo to run all sorts of things simultaneously. On the M3A79-T, I have 1 RaptorX, 3 500GB seagates in RAID5 and 2 DVD drives.

FYI, the reason the older SB600 boards all had external RAID controllers was not to keep things separate, it was because the SB600 only had a 4 channel SATA controller and the competitive stuff from Intel and NVidia had 6 or more, so the mobo manufacturers mostly put another 2 or 4 channel SATA/RAID controller on their high end boards to compete.

[crazydiamond]

i had no problems runnin raid with sata burner on asus m3a sb 600 a few builds ago so its nice to hear you can do it on the asus sb750 board too. do you know if its also possible on the fconn a79a-s? i think i might grab that board for pII

[nanohead]

i had no problems runnin raid with sata burner on asus m3a sb 600 a few builds ago so its nice to hear you can do it on the asus sb750 board too. do you know if its also possible on the fconn a79a-s? i think i might grab that board for pII

Its probably generic to the way the SB750 works. The mobo manufacturers BIOS may manage it differently, but the SB is the part that does the work.

They all use the same "Option ROM" (one of the Promise Technology provided parts of the SB600/SB700/SB750), as well as RAIDExpert (which is an AMD badged PAM from Promise also). So ultimately, it all depends on how you set it up, but performance should be much the same.

The worst thing is that the manuals all SUCK!!! from the mobo dudes, and either give you no info, or wrong info.

[Darxide]

Ahh, I see. Thanks nanohead, I didn't know the SB600 could only handle 4 SATA devices.
Although it seems strange that ASUS appear to have included an extra controller with the SB750, but it's only use seems to be a single e-SATA port!

Anyway, I'm gonna start the build soon, any advice on the best way to connect the drives I want? I'm guessing from what I've read, I should connect the 2 Velociraptors first, boot to the BIOS and configure the RAID, then shutdown and connect the DVD, powerup and install windows. Does that sound about right?
What would be the best of the 6 ports to use for the RAID? Does it make a difference?

Thanks.

[nanohead]

Ahh, I see. Thanks nanohead, I didn't know the SB600 could only handle 4 SATA devices.
Although it seems strange that ASUS appear to have included an extra controller with the SB750, but it's only use seems to be a single e-SATA port!

Anyway, I'm gonna start the build soon, any advice on the best way to connect the drives I want? I'm guessing from what I've read, I should connect the 2 Velociraptors first, boot to the BIOS and configure the RAID, then shutdown and connect the DVD, powerup and install windows. Does that sound about right?
What would be the best of the 6 ports to use for the RAID? Does it make a difference?

Thanks.

It seems to be specific to the way the BIOS is set up (the system BIOS, not the RAID/AHCI). You probably don't have to do anything fancy, just plug things in and set them up in the Option ROM (ie RAID Setup). On the 79-T at least, the RAID setup shows non RAID entities as "Single Drive", and you can select anything to join a RAID set.

There was one version of the Option ROM firmware that required that for a 2 disk RAID set that the disks be on adjacent ports (ie, port 1,2 or 3,4) as read by the Option ROM (not as labeled on the motherboard). But the current version and the SB750 seemed to cure that issue.

You can just attach whatever you want, use the Option ROM setup, and then install the drivers during Windows setup normally.

Hope this helps and doesn't confuse

[Darxide]

Thanks for the info, I'll give it a go.

Also, is it true that Vista allows RAID drivers to be installed from a USB stick?
Believe it or not, this is the first time I've decided to not include a floppy drive in a new build

[thigobr]

Thanks for the info, I'll give it a go.

Also, is it true that Vista allows RAID drivers to be installed from a USB stick?
Believe it or not, this is the first time I've decided to not include a floppy drive in a new build

Yes. The setup program can recognize USB drives so you can choose a driver from there.

[bacon612]

I would like to run 2 raptors in raid 0 and 4 1.5 terabyte seagates in raid 5 at the same time using the Foxconn FX790 board. Has anyone tried running two different kinds of arrays simultaneously on the SB750?

Ideally, i would like to boot from the raid0 and use the raid 5 as a storage volume. Any input would be appreciated as i cant find any info.

[SkullCracka]

i run raid 0 with dvd and an old ide xppro for dual boot no problem even on sb 600 on a m3a32mvp. so yes it can all be done. when you set the raid only the drives you set in the raid bios will be raid the others are what they are. sata or ide.

[Raiderman]

Also, if you have a raid already set up on a sb600, you wont have to do it again on the upgrade to sb750. In fact, on my old K9A2 Plat, I could switch between the amd raid controller and the promise raid controller, without rebuilding the array. In other words when I upgraded to the M3A79-T, I was able to plug all the drives in and re-install windows. 2x Raid 0, 1x data HD, 1x DvdRW.