ICH10R: Can I do RAID and still have another non-RAID drive?

idata · ‎09-22-2009

This is my first post here - I'm somewhat of a newb to RAID (and SATA for that matter). Just built a new core i7 system with an MSI Eclipse-plus motherboard. I'm using the ICH10R controller on the MB to control 2 128GB SSD's in RAID 0, which seems to be working just fine.

Question: The ICH10R controls 6 SATA ports (0 - 5) on my MB. Since I'm using only 2 of these for the RAID (ports 0 and 2), shouldn't I still be able to plug in other drives (either another SATA HDD or a CD/DVD optical drive) into one or more of the remaining 6 ports and use them as normal?

I tried doing this with a WD640GB drive, but BIOS didn't seem to indicate it was there.

Thanks for any help any of you could provide.

idata · ‎09-23-2009

I breifly chatted w/Intel support, and they told me that, yes, this should be no problem. Have not yet tried it again, but will tomorrow.

My BIOS does does list any of the Intel-controlled SATA ports (0-5) on the page where the others are listed. I believe that this is somehow because the only two drives plugged into these are in RAID mode.

idata · ‎09-26-2009

I'm curious to know whether you were able to add the single drive and have it recognized by the motherboard BIOS. If so, did you have to clear the real time clock to have the BIOS recognize the new drive? And if you *did* have to clear the clock, was your Raid0 still intact afterward?

idata · ‎09-25-2009

My experience,on ASUS P5Q PRO (P45+ICH10R)

Create raid with SATA port0,1,single drive on other port set as JOB mode.

of course you cant see it in M/B bios,do it in RAID bios