ICH10R: Force RAID BIOS to ignore drive and allow AHCI BIOS to control it?

idata · ‎02-25-2011

Hi,

I have a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R motherboard which includes the ICH10R. It allows me to set the ICH10R to IDE, AHCI, or RAID. I have it set to RAID since I have an internal, 3+1 RAID5 array set up. I have an additional, external RAID5 array that has a single SATA connection. If I set the ICH10R to AHCI mode, this array (which is 4.5 TB) is recognized without any issues and is fully supported by the Windows management software. However, when the ICH10R is set to RAID mode the drive is improperly recognized as 95.6 GB by the RAID BIOS and does not show up at all in Windows.

Is there any way to force the RAID BIOS to ignore this drive or port and allow the AHCI BIOS to control it, similar to the way it works for optical drives? I cannot use the AHCI mode since I need my internal array. I've tried several different versions of the RAID OROM (8.0.0.1039, 8.7.0.1007, 10.0.0.1046) and none of them support this external 4.5 TB array in RAID mode. I suppose it would also be acceptable if the RAID BIOS would properly recognize the array as well, although I'm not sure whether it would work with the management software.

Here are some details for the morbidly curious 😉

Internal array: 4x500 GB drives, RAID5

External array: Promise DS4600, eSATA interface, 4x1.5 TB drives, RAID5

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Management software: Promise SmartNAVI

Thank you in advance for any help. I've tried multiple configurations and am out of ideas at this point. I have other SATA controllers as well, but none of them (JMB363, SiI3132, RocketRAID) work with the SmartNAVI management software. This is a critical feature since it allows S.M.A.R.T. monitoring of the individual drives within the external array.

Best regards,

Jason

idata · ‎02-25-2011

Update: I got a response from Gigabyte technical support stating that drives >2TB are not supported in RAID mode due to a hardware limitation. Is this true? Is it a hardware limitation or a limitation with the Option ROM? If the latter, is there a version of the RAID OROM which supports drives >2TB?

Speaking of the Option ROM, can anyone point me to a changelog detailing the differences between the different versions? I would also like to know which versions are supported by my chipset, since I am able to modify my motherboard BIOS and try different revisions.

idata · ‎03-24-2011

It is true the rst product does not support drives > 2tb. Rst 10.1 only supports disks >2tb in ahci mode. There is no rst version that supports >2tb disks available today. The rst 10.1 option rom will not show any disks >2tb in it's ui.