KA92 Platinum - JBOD SATA - Vista 64 - Promise RAID

I just setup a new machine with the KA92 Platinum and almost everything is running perfectly excluding the 2 750GB SATA 3.0gb drives I have installed on the Promise SATA ports.
Configuration - (Second RAID enabled, onboard ATA set to IDE, 750's individual JBOD)
SATA Port #1 - WD VelociRaptor 300GB system drive
SATA Port #2 - DVDRW
SATA Port #3 - BRD\DVDRW
SATA Port #4 - Case eSATA copnnection
Promise SATA Port #1 - Samsung 750 SATAII
Promise SATA Port #2 - Samsung 750 SATAII
The issue is that although the Devicer Manager recognizes the 2 drives () and they are visible in Disk Management, I cant create a new volume on either of them. As soon as I try to create a volume Windows recognizes a new device and tries to install a driver which it cant find.
I tried removing the Promise Drives and Changing the ATA to RAID but that just caused BSOD until I reset it.
Any Ideas?
Thanks

Regrettably that last idea didn't work for me :( I formatted the two drives then re-connected the two drives and enabled the promise raid without configuring the discs into an array, booted into Windows and the drives didn't show up anywhere, I then added them to JBOD in promise config (which deletes the boot info) and started into Windows with the results I was experiencing before. To be honest, at this point Ive pretty much given up on the Promise ports ever working for me, at least with SATA drives, perhaps SAS drive would have better luck but I'm not going to spend the money to find out, it looks like an external eSata setup for me... I just wish these were regular Sata ports rather than promise, life would have been sooooo much easier, and cheaper in the end.... Thanks again everyone!

Similar Messages

How to Setup RAID 0 on K9A2 Platinum using SATA 5&6 Promise Controller

Setup:
MSI K9A2 Platinum
2 x Sapphire 3870 HD in Crossfire Mode
2 x 500 GB WD Caviar Hard drives ( I want to put these in RAID 0)
Pioneer 115DBK DVD Burner
LITEON BD/DVD Player SATA
Phenom 9850
GSKILL 4 GB 1066
Antec P182 Case
Rosewill 850 W Power Supply
Windows Vista 64 bit
I am trying to set the RAID up on the PROMISE SATA ports 5&6. I have enabled the additional RAID controller in the BIOS and set the SATA controller to RAID. One drive shows up as JBOD and I can set the other to RAID 0 in the Fast Track utility. What do I need to do to change the JBOD to RAID? I'm sure its showing that I am a newbie at this and first RAID attempt. It's a new setup so I don't mind having to re-load VISTA.
Additionally - I cannot get the IDE DVD burner to work. If there is any obvious fix for this I'd appreciate input. The SATA BD Player works just fine.
Thanks for any advice!

Sorry, my explanation seems to be too short... some remarks:
- Yes, you need to go to the Promnise Setup prgram like you say;
- Yes, you have to delete the JBOD-array, but you also need to delete the RAID-0 array. Both drives become available now to setup RAID.
- Make a new striping (0) array and select both drives to use -> make array and reboot.
- go into bios and select the RAID-0 array as second boot device and your DVD/CD as first boot device (for now);
- reboot and boot off the Vista Setup CD/DVD.
- Wait until Vista asks to select the drive to install to. It will show you the RAID-array or it will show you nothing. If it shows you noting (and I bet it won't ), then choose to manually install a driver. Now, you can select the Promise driver to use. Vista will load it and recognize your RAID array. Select the array and tell Vista to install.
- Now start hoping that it will work out!
Good luck!!

955X Platinum - use SATA as IDE or RAID ?

Hello everyone,
I just received my new MSI 955X Platinum motherboard today. The boot-up screen looks quite horrible! Is there any way to change it?
Now, I want to install Windows XP on my WD 36GB SATA 10,000 RPM hard drive. What will give me optimal performance - setting the SATA in IDE mode or in RAID mode ? From what I understand, setting it as an IDE HDD does not need the RAID driver floppy during the intial stages of Windows XP setup. RAID mode will require the RAID driver floppy.
Also, can the VIA SATA controller be mapped as IDE as well ?
Thanks for your time.
Regards,
Kamran

Yes, you can disable the boot up screen in the BIOS. But if you thought of changing it to something else, hmm you must hack the BIOS code, which I don't recommend.
1 SATA drive? definitely set as IDE. RAID is for stacking up multiple HDDs together as a single logical drive.

[Athlon64] Promise/SATA/Promise/RAID/Promise! What's it all mean?

I've been reading up on some of the RAID information scattered around the Internet, and I've also been reading the booklets bundled with my MSI motherboard. My questions lean more toward the meaning of Promise and its various "forms" (?), and I think these booklets have left some holes.
1) What are the major differences between Promise and VIA Serial ATA setups, other than the HDD LED light (not) functioning?
2) Why does my BIOS allow me to select RAID/SATA from the Promise controller, when Promise is only one choice of Serial ATA setup on my board, as opposed to VIA? Why is RAID offered as an "option" with Serial ATA? (RAID is a way of utilizing the drive, SATA is the drive interface!)
3) "Promise FastTrak 378" or "Promise SATA150 378" controllers...huh? Aren't they both Serial ATA capable? What about Via's controller? What's the difference between the two Promises?
Basically, I'm confused with the rerferences to Promise. Thanks again...

Hi, I'll try to create some clarity here...Promise is a manufacturer of controllers, both add on PCI card controllers and onboard controllers. Your board has 2 drive controllers, the VIA VT8237 Southbridge and the Promise Fasttrack 20378 controller. Both controllers handle SATA and IDE interfaces with hard drives. They both offer you IDE(-RAID) and SATA(-RAID) configurations. Some say the Promise works faster, some say the VIA works faster. Try for yourself to decide which works for you. Now, to answer your questions:
1) The only difference is that the Promise controller is on the boards PCI bus. This might help during overclocking, because PCI frequency would be locked at 33 MHz. Your board doesn't overclock very well, so this is not that big a difference. On both controllers your HDD led should function normally.
2) You can select various settings in your bios to match the installed hard drive configuration, so the controller knows what to look for. RAID configurations come in arrays: RAID 0 = striping mode, RAID 1 = mirroring mode, RAID 0+1 = 4 drives striped + mirrored, JBOD = just a bunch of discs installed. You can setup both controllers, VIA and Promise, in your bios.
3) As mentioned above, you have two controllers: the Promise and the VIA. SATA150 indicates the interface (Serial ATA max. 150 MB/sec). This interface is newer than Parallel ATA (= IDE max. 133 MB/sec) and SCSI (various speeds, very fast). Now, there's also SATA2 (= Serial ATA max. 300 MB/sec). Don't mind all of these speeds too much, a single drive will not reach them.
Hope to have made things a bit more clear...

K9A2 Platinum bios 1.4 or 1.5 Promise RAID fail Boot.

Ok I have BIOS version 1.3 running fine. I want to upgrade to a bios that officially support the phenom and its power usage. So back in may I try to upgrade to bios 1.4. No good the machine will not boot the RAID set that contains window XP. :( Reverted back. Contacted support. Not much help... a few weeks pass. Contact support again they send me bios version 1.51. Same issue. Reverted back to 1.3. Recently I tried the final release of 1.5 with the same issue.
Anyone out there using a phenom on the K9A2 and booting with the Promise RAID controller in a striped 0 set ? How did you get it to work with the current bios version. Tech support 'claims' they have no problem with the bios and that they have tested it with the promise controller booting to XP.
Thanks,
Jon Harrell

Considering the very large files that regularly run through the system and the extra cpus that windows inefficiently uses I doubt a software controller would impact the performance gains significantly. The units we have prep large format presentations and regularly handle very large files. Bandwidth is key. If this was the average desktop or even a web server yes 1 drive would most definitely be faster. But that would be a different subject.
Although now we might just be considering scraping the whole MSI created mess, and purchasing a hardware solution like that of the quad sata raid in our server.
But for now:
Does any one know the perfect combination?
e.g. Promise driver 1.1.1030.47 !work with Bios 1.50 (promise 2.8.1030.0032)
Thanks,
jh

MSI NEO fis2r with promise raid and 4 SATA disks?

I have been trying to figure this out.....
I want to have a striping across 4 sata disks 3x250gb and
1x120gb.
I also want my IDE CD-ROM to work.
I can't seem to find the right combo in the Bios on how to set it up
and when I get the raid setup screen it only shows 2 drives not 4.
Anyone?
Thanks,
M

So in short i cannot have 4 SATA drives in a raid since the promise controller only supports 2...
I should be able to put in 4 sata drives in the machine and software raiding them or make them dynamic disks.
Well that blows! Guess I have to go out and buy a 4-port sata raid card.
Bummer.
-M

ITunes Causing Vista BSOD with RAID Errors

This thread is here to collate as much information and posts on the problem regarding BSODs occuring in Windows Vista and causing RAID errors to occur.
What Happens: Start iTunes and start performing a hard drive intensive task (Importing, converting etc). iTunes will seem to 'freeze', in some cases up to five minutes, but will regardless cause Windows Vista to BSOD. On restart the RAID array will complain of errors. Most cases are that restarting again and clearing the error will be fine, though there are some reports that people have had to rebuild their array.
Common Elements: Windows Vista, iTunes, Intel RAID Chipsets (ICH6R, ICH7R and ICH8R chipsets reported so far.
Further Links:
http://cs.rthand.com/blogs/blogwithrighthand/archive/2007/03/05/iTunes-is-trying-to-destroy-my-RAID-10.aspx
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7588_102-0.html?forumID=70&threadID=236344&messageID =2435047
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4343562
If you are experiencing this problem, please post here with your details, experience with it and information. The more the better!

Here is some additional info about the ICHR8 Intel RAID Chipset and Western Digital SATA Gen 2 Drives in RAID Array.
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=4368779#4368779
Custom Intel based Generic PC Windows XP Pro 750GB NAS Storage, DVDRW DL, 5th Gen 80GB iPod, 2nd Gen 8GB Nano (Both Black)
I'm running a dual boot with WinXP Pro SP2 as the primary OS, Vista RC1 on separate partition. I had Vista Ultimate (RC1) Release Candidate 1, a pre-release version of Vista up and running with iTunes version 7.1.1. Updating My Library, when system crashed and trashed my array.
I was running 2 400GB WD's when my RAID 1 erred. The array corrupted and after limping through several array rebuilds and Windows repairs, Win XP finally died and was unrecoverable.
I originally suspected an issue with Vista & iTunes, especially since I was running a pre-release version of Vista then I remembered reading a recent WD Support issue about some newer WD SATA Gen 2 drives failing in RAID arrays.
To make a long story short, thank God for my back-up NAS Drives, I lost my array. Traced the problem to a Raid compatibility issue with the WD drives running in full SATA ATA Gen 2 transfer rate mode and the Intel ICHR8 SATA RAID Controller. They don't play nice together when stressed with large file transfers. Replaced WD's with two Seagate 750's in RAID 1, running full SATA Gen 2 mode and have had no problems since.
Check out WD's Support forums, if you have newer WD's I'll bet it's a SATA RAID / Drive issue more than iTunes and Vista.
Message was edited by: Rain-Man

Promise RAID vs. Via RAID

When I was setting up my system I wasn't really sure which RAID controller I should use in order to get the best performance...I opted to go with the Via controller as it is an integrated part of the KT800 chipset whereas the Promise RAID controller is an optional add-in chip (or such is my understanding), so I figured using the Via controller would give the best performance...but I'm curious as to how the Promise controller performs. Has anyone tried setting an array up both ways and testing to see which controller performed better?
I'm running two 36 GB WD Raptor SATA drives in RAID-0 off the Via controller, and I get a score of 61 MB/sec in Sandra 2004's File System benchmark...if anyone is running a similar array off the Promise controller and could post their benchmark results, I'd appreciate it.

I've 'tested' both controllers.
Before the K8T, I was using a KT4 ultra with a Promise 376 and two raptors RAID0 (around 60-70Mb/s with HDTach)
Then I switched to the Promise 378 of the K8T (I keep promise to keep data). A little bit better than with the 376 of the KT4V but not very clear. I recently put the two raptors on the VIA. A little bit better but again, not very clear. It seems however that with the VIA the output is more 'unstable' .. I mean: with Promise, HD Tach gives me a straight line from the begining of the disk array to the end; with VIA, it's less straight.
I think I will crash my RAID 0 to test with one raptor on the VIA and one on the Promise. OSsystem for a disk, software and apps for the other one. I'm not sure that it's a goo idea

Promise RAID problems

Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone on the list had problems with the Promise RAID.
My system is a 875P Neo. The two SATA drives are Seagate ST2380023AS. The system shas been wrking fone for about a month than troubles started. My system is updated to all the latest patches WinXP and MSI wise as well.
The system keep corrupting itself. When rebooting WinXP goes into a repair mode and run chkdsk. After in installing PAM 4.0 and enabled the logging I see these messages popping up in the event viewer:
Source: fasttx2k
event ID: 9
Desc: The device \device\scsi\fasttx2k1 did not respond within the the timeout period.
I had to recover WinXP a few times now and I can't keep working with the system this way and wondering when it is going to corrupt some files what I have not backed up yet.
I can't find any answers on Promise's website or here.
Any help appreciated,
--Laszlo--

Thanks for your help. I think my config is more simple than yours. I only have WinXp on this system on the Promise controller. I have the two drives in a stripe configuration, RAID 0 with 2x80GB drives. Same manufacture same BIOS on them.
I am not using the Intel SATA controller. The only device is a CD drive there.
What can I configure on the RAID controller? The only option I saw is for cache. Write Through or Write Back. Mine is set to the default of Write Back.
How could I verify that the drives individualy performing well? Is there any utility from MSI or Promise allow me to do that? What version of the Promise driver are you using and what is your BIOS version? I have the latest available from MSI which is 1.00.1.29 and my system BIOS is 1.9.
Thanks,

MSI NEO 4 Platinum with SATA Drive

I have recently built a new machine with the following specs but I am having problems with system stability in windows and was wondering whether it's because of the way I set up the hard drive.
Specs:
MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum
AMD Athlon 64 3500 Winchester
Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu
1GB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM
Sapphire X800 XT
Sound Blaster Audigy Player
Maxtor 80GB Serial ATA Hard Drive
Maxtor 40GB IDE Hard Drive
550W PSU
I plugged my SATA drive into slot 1 and booted from the maxblast 3 CD to partition and set up the hard drive. I then installed windows 98 and upgraded to windows 2000. My system seems to be slow and laggy, though it seems mostly fine in games. When I listen to music and browse a CD at the same time the sound stutters and lags. I am getting lots of slow down when doing lots of things on the computer but it shouldn't slow down as much as it is. I am also getting windows error messages.
Is there a different way I should have installed the hard drive. I can't boot from my windows 2000 disk in dos because it's only upgrade version. I read on the forum about adding the SATA drive to a raid array before installing windows but I don't understand what this means. Can you help?
The floppy drive also doesn't seem to work so I couldn't install SATA drivers at windows setup. How can I get it working because the lead seems to be connected correctly as it gives an error message on boot up with the purple stripe the other side of the floppy drive.

Quote
I can do it with a windows XP upgrade CD surely
yes
Quote
Me Yesterday, 12:55
If you have an XP upgrade CD follow the following steps.
1) Decide which HD you wish to install XP on.
If the Sata - Then turn of PC & unplug IDE Drive, this is a windows thing, as XP will see the Ide drive b4 the Sata & try to create the 1st drive as system drive. You can plug the ide back in when the install is complete.
2) Insert XP Cd. Enter Bios - Advanced bios change boot order so that CD is 1st device. or press f11 as pc posts, & select CD.
3) The PC should now boot from the XP CD.
You don't need to load any floppy drivers.
But XP will ask to see a qualifying product, put in your 2000 or 98 CD.
You should see a Hard drive Partition Setup screen - you can use this to delete any existing partition & format the drive (Don't use the quick format it's only quick cos it dont check for errors so slow & safe is best. See section How to partition and format your hard disk by using the Windows XP Setup program

K9A2 *V1* Bios 1.8 - No drivers for Promise RAID controller.

Does anyone know which set of Promise Raid drivers work with the updated Promise firmware that is part of the 1.8 bios update?
Version 1.2 of the bios includes Promise version 28.1030.0021 which works with at least 1.1.1030.27 of the promise drivers.
Version 1.8 of the bios includes Promise version 28.1030.0032 for which I cannot find any working drivers; do they exist? (Vista cannot see the controller and is unable to locate a suitable driver. Trying to use existing promise driver fails since it will not recognise the device)
Just had a brainwave. On the MSI site, there is an updated driver pack for the Promise controller (this is a V1 board); this version is
Vista32/64 Ver.: 1.1.1030.47
Is this the version that is compatible with v1.8 of the bios (and hence 28.1030.0032)?

Give them a try, they if they work will show soon enough.

K8N Neo2 + NVRAID + Promise Raid Controller = not working right

I'm trying to get my Promise Raid card working with nvraid enabled and I've finally given up. It works fine with NVRAID disabled though. I have 2xSata on Raid 0 and 2xIDE on raid 0+1. i also have two other IDE's on non-raid and two atapi cdrom drives. In order for me to use all of my storage devices, i need the promise controller to boot. The Prommise RAID controller's BIOS will not boot with nvraid enabled. WindowsXP detects the drives, but if i try to mount them via PAM (Promise Arry Management), it says one of the drives is corrupt/not working. but if i have both the ide raid hd's on the nvraid w/ sata raid, then it works fine. I just won't be able to use my cdrom drives. if anyone has a fix for this, please let me know. and sorry for the long descriptions. thanks.

Why don't you go into BIOS and alter the IRQ manually for that PCI card, because probably that card is using the same IRQ as the nVidia one.
Be well....

K8N Neo2 Platinum MB + SATA Hard Disks

Hi,
I would like to use some additional disk in my PC and therefore buy SATA disks.
The OS is WIN XP Pro and I want to keep my IDE configuration which is:
C:\ = IDE hard disk Primary Master
E:\ = IDE hard disk Prmary Slave
D:\ = DVD Secondary Master
F:\ = IDE hard disk secondary slave
and to this I want to add just as data storage SATA 300GB hard disks (¿ up to 4 ? is that possible ?)
regards Rainer

I am not familiar with K8N Neo2-F so consult your manual to confirm my answers to your questions:
1- "Is this also the case for the SATA connectors on the K8N Neo2-F ??" Highly likely since your motherboard is a stripped down version of the Neo2 Platinum.
2- "And do SATA 1&2 require different drivers than 3&4?" For normal SATA operation these SATA drives are respectively contol by your NF3 chipset and you Realtek chipset. When you install or update your Nvidia & Realtek driver package you install all that is required to run normal SATA operation. Should you decide to use a RAID configuration with your SATA drive then another RAID specific driver would have to be installed at system level.
3- "Also, is there a significant increase in performance when going from PATA to SATA on this series of mobos?" My answer does not take into account RAPTOR HDs which are in a super class of their own. Medium to High end latest PATA & first generation SATA HDs in the 7200 RPM class are promoted by their OEM as having respective top transfer speeds of 133 and 150 MB/s. Comparing my Seagate 120 gigs PATA HD to my other two Seagate 200 gigs SATA HDs is not very scientific since they are not all 200 Gigs. Therefore use discretion interpreting results.
a. PATA - Peak transfer = low eighties ; Steady Transfer = high sixties
b. SATA - Peak transfer = mid nineties ; Steady Transfer = low eighties
It has ben a while since I did these PATA/SATA test so I am working from memory only. One thing that however sticks in my mind is that the delta between my PATA & SATA drives, for peak and steady performance, was very close to 12 MB/s in favor of first generation SATA. Could this be possibly related to (150-133), I do not know for sure.
SATA II generation are now coming to market. These new generation SATA II drives will most likely widen the performance gap between them and older SATA I or PATA drive.
Take good care,

Storage redundancy using two OSX servers - Promise RAID

Hi All,
Currently we run 1 Mac Mini and Server on Mavericks connected via Thunderbolt to a Promise RAID 5 device, it works great. I want some redundancy and have purchased an additional Mac Mini to backup Open directory and DNS as our main server does pretty much everything.
Incase the main server fails what is the best way for the Promise RAID to stay up? I've read you can create a "Thunderbolt Bridge" by connecting both Mac Mini's via thunderbolt cable and one to the RAID??? Is this correct? Or.... purchase a Thunderbolt to Gigiabyte adapter and run the RAID off the network. Any idea how to configure this?
Thanks.
James

Sadly Apple do not provide much if any facilities for building a resilient setup along the lines you are thinking.
The nearest you can get happens to be for Open Directory and DNS. You would setup two servers, one as the DNS master and one as a DNS secondary, and you would setup one server as the Open Directory Master, and the other as the Open Directory Replica. Neither of these require the two servers to share any storage or files, the two servers would send the information between themselves over the network. This only works for those two services.
You couldn't for example have both connected to the promise and act as File Servers. (Both ordinary files sharing or network directories.)
To get nearer to having two servers sharing common storage so that if one goes down the other takes over would require a SAN and not direct attached storage like the Promise. However Apple's software does not support this for file sharing services.

Alternative to Promise RAID

I'm among the disappointed.. currently have 6 Xserve RAIDs and now going to have to resort to ebay for drive replacements until things just die on a massive scale.
$12k for a Promise RAID is far beyond my budget. The $6k entry Apple was feasible, and then buying drive or ebaying them as I went was ok. Does anyone know of any other more sensible alternatives now that the Apple RAID is no more?

Apple's page on the Promise RAID is pretty minimal. Promise's site (www.promise.com) has more info and the manual available for download. The manual is much more detailed than the XServe RAID manual.
Error notifications are available and are more flexible than the XServe RAID. It's detailed on page 73 of the manual, but they allow six different levels of email to any user.
I've only skimmed the manual, but in general I'd say:
1) The Promise RAID is (on paper) a very nice step up from the XServe RAID. It's faster (RAID 50 and 60), more redundant (RAID 6 and 60, active/active controllers) and has greater capacity (16 drives, external chassis, one controller can access all drives).
2) The configurations options are more flexible, more of the underlying capability is exposed to the user. This is good and bad. It will make initial setup a little more daunting, but ultimately it allows you to tune things more carefully.
3) If we can use the retail product effectively it is available at cheaper similar or cheaper price points (outside of Apple) than the XServe RAID (particularly if the 12 bay chassis works)
4) The retail versions of the box ship without drives. You buy your own drives and install them in carriers. Again, a little less plug and play than Apple, but you have access to cheaper drives. Just don't buy the cheapest thing out there, get something rated for 24x7 use.
5) None of this is worth anything if you can't actually plug the thing into an OS X machine and have it perform as they say it will
So in short there are lots of questions about actual experience with the box, and it won't be as easy to set up the first time, but on paper it's more functionality for the same or less money.

KA92 Platinum - JBOD SATA - Vista 64 - Promise RAID

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for