SATA RAID conflics with POMISE T3 RAID Bios

I've read quite a few of the RAID setup issues concerning the "Extra" RAID settings under "integrated peripherals" for the K9A2 Platinum. My problem seems to be a bit unique. I can't get both the SATA RAID and the Promise "Fast Track" to work together. If I enable the Extra RAID Controllers the Fastrack Bios does not recognize my SATA RAID.
This simply means that for some reason the motherboard SATA RAID conflicts or disables the PROMISE RAID Bios and vice versa. So I have not been able to activate my eSATA ports or use anything connected to the SATA5-6 ports without going into the CMOS and setting SATA DEVICES to IDE and then turning on the EXTRA Raid Controller under "Integrated Peripherals" in the CMOS. Unless I'm wrong. I am almost sure that this scenario is right.
The second issue is that I cannot get my ram to go in DUAL CHANNEL mode. But I will post that issue another time.
thx
Please Advise.
Ami Bios v1.4
K9A2 Platinum MB, 790FX,
AMD 9850 Black Edition,
8GB GSkill RAM (800Mhz),
Samsung 500GB SATA11 (x4),
Radeon HD 3870 512 MB Video,
Rosewill 950Watt PSU,
Pioneer DVD RW,
NEC DVD RW,
9-in-1 USB Card Reader
2 ext (USB/eSATA) hard Drives (eSATA will not work because these ports are controlled by the PROMISE T3 Bios)

With Vista Ultimate SP1 on my machine the USB Flasher Tool kept on crashing when the BIOS was at v 1.2 on the KA92 mainboard.
The DOS window came up fine but it appeared that every susequent module that was brought up for detecting the motherboard caught some kind of conlfict and terminated causing Vista to summon the program terminated message box. Eventually the dos prompt would state that it could not detect the motherboard and close. All in red text. This happened only when I flashed the BIOS with v1.2. I wanted to go back to 1.3 just to verify that the BIOS version was the cause and the only reason I got back to 1.3 or 1.4 easily was becaus it was backed up by the tool so all I had to do was rename the backup.bin file(s). Again everything went as expected with the USB Flasher Tool until I loaded the v1.2 BIOS. It could not even detect the mainboard.
The only reason I didn't need the tool anymore was that it backed up the versions of the bios for each time that I had flashed the bios previously.
Ami Bios v1.2
K9A2 Platinum MB, 790FX,
AMD 9850 Black Edition,
8GB GSkill RAM (800Mhz),
Samsung 500GB SATA2 (x4),
Radeon HD 3870 512 MB Video,
Rosewill 950Watt PSU,
Pioneer DVD RW,
NEC DVD RW,
9-in-1 USB Card Reader

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Hi.
I have a KT3 ULTRA 2 with onboard RAID controller. I have installed a SUNIX 2 port SATA PCI Controller which works perfectly & appears in the selectable boot devices. This is not a problem except for the fact that I have 4 devices on the On-Board Raid Controller. When the on-board raid controller is enabled, the SATA device dissapears from the boot options & I can no longer boot from the SATA controller.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Many Thanks

I had already tried that....
I set the boot sequence to use the SATA card & then renabled the on-board raid, but after reboot the sata card is not available as a possible boot device & asks me to insert system disk...even if the boot sequence is set to boot from other devices.
Really annoyying this, looks like I am going to have to get a different motherboard for something so silly. I am already at the latest bios release.

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Solved!
Go to Solution.

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Raid setup with g-tech raid

hello there.
bit confused by this raid business. Just got a 4tb g-tech raid system which has 2 drives of 2tb each.
It shows as one disk in finder. DO i only have to set 'RAID Type' to 'Mirrored RAID set' in disk utility? Do i need to make 2 partitions first?!
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I don't know much about these, but since nobody who does has happened along . . .
There are different kinds of RAID. The two most common are:
A +Concatenated RAID Set+ (or RAID-0) combines multiple disks into one volume; the size is the total of all the disks in the set. It sounds like that's how yours is set up.
A +Mirrored RAID Set+ (often called RAID-1) keeps identical copies on each disk, so if one fails, you don't lose any data, and can keep running. The size is the size of the smallest disk in the set. It sounds like that's what you want.
If all the drives are in one enclosure, they're usually configured by hardware switches on the controller, or possibly software options you can set via an app that comes with the set.
Check with the maker (or instructions that came with the system) for setup information.

SB600 RAID 0 on SATA 1 & 2 with a DVD SATA on SATA 4?

Can I have my 2 HD's connected to SATA 1 & 2 (SB600) in a RAID 0 config and also have my DVD on the SB600 (say on SATA 4)? When I try, I no longer see the DVD reported and can't make it a boot device (which I need).
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Thanks!

Quote from: Wonkanoby on 29-July-08, 18:56:22
The SB600 sets the mode of all sata ports the same
That is not the fact! There is something wrong with: MSI motherboard, or on-board RAID controller, or drivers
HD in RAID have to configure, but the DVD in SATA 3 or 4 not. Controller know the difference between SATA optical drives and HD-s. And everything should work like a charm.
I managed to install Windows XP x64 on MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital. Everything works well. But when I have installed my Palit GF8800GT Sonic on PCI-E port my DVD disappear. OK, there is conflict! I disable in BIOS on-board firewire controller, and my DVD has been there again. There is just the resources conflict. OK... COM port was disabled as well.
OS. Windows XP x64 Edition
Mo-Bo. MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital
AMD 5200+ X2
GPU. Palit GF8800GT Sonic 512Mb
2 x GEIL 1GB Black Dragon (Dual Chanel)
2 x WD 640 GB SATA 2 in RAID 0 (SB600 driver 2.5.1540.48)
and SB Audigy 2 ZS on second PCI port.
EVERYTHING WORKS WELL !!!
OK. I have tryout to install Vista x64/x32. And I cannot see my optical drive :( On BIOS there is not the Plug and Ply OS setting to set NO, and then manually set the IRQ-s. Whatever I do in BIOS with IRQ-s nothing happend. Vista OS do the job alone :(
I try to install Win XP Pro x32, but I only get the blue screen. I try so many SB600 drivers and nothing happend. There is only the Blue Screen :(
OK. There is something very wrong with this MSI/AMD products

C240 M3S can't setup first boot with Cisco UCSC RAID SAS 2008M-8i Mezzanine in BIOS

Hi all,
I have a problem with C240 M3S with boot device.
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Sorry,
I can't find the item of local storage.
I never setup the boot order ( default bios can find raid card, I don't know that raid can't be found at this time )
Would you please offer any references, thank you
By the way, I check the install guide for c240 m3
If the RAID controller does not appear in the system boot order even with the option ROMs for those
slots are enabled, the RAID controller option ROM might not have sufficient memory space to
execute. In that case, disable other option ROMs that are not needed for the system configuration to
free up some memory space for the RAID controller option ROM.
this means I want to turn off all option ROMs to get more memory ? However, I turn off all option ROMs, I still can't find the raid.
Thank you very much!!

Trying to setup RAID 1 with new SATA drives on xserve 2009 model

Trying to setup RAID 1 with new SATA drives on xserve 2009 model
I have an Xserve rack mount model Xserve 2.26 Quad Core (EMC# 2279) with an Apple RAID card, 24GB RAM (running 10.9 Server software)
Purchased two Western Digital 1TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64MB Cache Black WD1003FZEX drives
It came with three 160GB SATA drives. I'm leaving one of the original 160GB drives for the OS, but I want to replace the 2 other drives and set it up with RAID 1 (mirrored). I bought 2 brand new Western Digital 1TB SATA drives and formatted them on another Mac through Disk Utility with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) formatting. I then placed the new drives in the Xserve and booted it up. After I login it immediately gives me 2 error windows saying...
"Apple RAID Card
The Apple RAID Card installed in your system requires your attention."
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I have both drives mounted on the desktop, as separate drives, but I really need to set these up as a RAID 1.
I've been reading other forums, where others have been able to get this to work by using a jumper on certain pins (5 & 6)of the drive to back down the transfer rate to 1.5 Gb per second. I tried that and it didn't work for me. Maybe I used the wrong pins -- I just don't know. I'm also wondering if there is some Apple firmware that is required on these drives? I'm asking for help from anyone who has gone through this same issue. Thanks in advance.

UPDATE -- I had an issue with the RAID card battery, it was dead and I have since replaced it. But I am still unable to setup the RAID 1 drive configuration. Does anyone know if it has something to do with the faster transfer rates on these new drives. Maybe they need to be clocked down with certain jumper settings on these Western Digital drives? Or am I fighting a losing battle because these drives don't have Apple firmware? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Lenovo D20, Type 4155-21G With 5x1.5tb Raid 5, Windows 7 64bit install problem.

H
Id like to just document a current machine and works and see if any thing is glaringly wrong..
Above spec machine has an onboard marrvel 66xx raid card, a raid 5 volume has been created, total useable space is around 5.5TB.
The software in play here is the following..
Orignal Lenovo recovery disk set, this is Rescue and recovery boot disk 1, then the OS which is Vista 32 Business, the disk label is actual 64bit but its not 64bit its 32bit.
The machine finally has to leave with Windows 7 64bit ultimate.
I have looked into the upgrade paths and so on and basicly you need vista 64bit ultimate in theory, certain hacks are possible such as renaming the os level or name via the registery, but this is dirverting from my post.
Here is what has been done and what has happend.
20th Jan.
Start of day.
Raid 5 volume created.
Factory recovery completed windows vista business 32bit.
Attempt to upgrade Windows vista business to Windows 7 ultimate from with in windows, windows 7 alerts this is not a compatable system etc.
At this stage since the 64bit upgrade is not possible from the known good lenovo state (lenovo vista business factory desktop etc) the second disks in the "Windows 7 32bit + 64bit any time upgrade package was ran.
The 32bit version of the Windows 7 ultimate was ran, this did complete sucessfully.
The 64bit version of the windows 7 was attempted once more from with in the newly installed Windows 7 32 bit but again this upgrade route is not supported.
At this stage a custom install was completed (which means a fresh install which wipes the drive) / fresh install, of the windows 7 64bit any time upgrade disk.
For some reason the Windows 7 64bit any time upgrade key failed to be accepted.
At this stage a second engineer repeated all steps completed to verify and on the second go around the FRESH install of Windows 64bit any time upgrade (stand alone install / custom etc) the key worked!..
This is were it gets interesting.
Lets recap, we have a D20 with 5x1.5tb sata hard drives in raid 5, all on the onboard marvel raid card.
Windows 7 64bit has been sucessfully installed, and of course the next step is to install the lenovo system update tool. (version for windows 7, I understand this is fully 64bit compatable..)
This was completed and pc doctor and one other misc application install, the system requested to restart and then ....
The raid BIOS of the marvel card reported that the raid had become degraded..!!
An inspection of the onboard raid information results that the disk 0 of the 5 disks, was no longer assigned to the RAID 5, with teh remaining several disks still "assigned".
At this stage the only option is to delete the raid five array and recreate it.
This has been done and the factory recovery process has once again been restarted and an attempt will be made to perform the custom install with hopefully the windows 7 64bit any time upgrade install detecting the previous version although I would say that it would not need to detect anything since this is now longer an upgrade but a custom fresh install.
Further information.
There is a System bios update from the 5th of Jan 2010, this has been burnt to cd and will be applyed against the machine shortly.
We have had some conversation about just how it is that a disk can fatally pop out from the raid five volume like this, was it a coincidence that it coninsided with the power cycle process dirrectly after the system update installation?
Tommorow a Windows 64bit OEM package will be applied against this machine and since we have the relivant driver file for the onboard raid card (sourced from the drivers and applications lenovo recovery disk set), there should be less of a problem in key acceptance.
Kind of a werid situation, what looks like a possible hardware problem and a stupid microsoft upgrade qulification problem.
Is there any thing stupid I have over looked?
Thanks, sorry for the long post but this is the story in full.
Note from Moderator: Fixed formatting issue.

21st Jan..
The D20 has sucessfully had vista business factory reinstalled and then Windows 7 64bit installed.
Dirrectly after the Windows 7 installation and power cycle, one of the five 1.5tb hard drives have dropped out of the raid, visable as "DEGRADED", uppon further inspection via control m, the middle drive (not drive 0 as before) drive 2 (0,1,2,3,4,5) has dropped out and is not marked as assigned, it is marked with no label or free.
This is high strangeness, it is my understanding that the RAID technologies are transparent to the OS so it should not be in any way the Windows 7 install triggering this, the last occurance was also during a Windows 7 power cycle but dirrectly after the system update tool being installed.
At this stage it would appear that Windows 7 64-bit used in conjunction with the supplment driver disk marked as (drivers and apps, windows xp vista, windows 7) is not able to complete and remain stable.
I suspect a possible driver issue but if this was the case surely the windows 7 install would not progress past the first installation point where the driver disks is required to actually use and see the array via the controler.
I will update this thread with more information as it becomes available.
Machine delivery eta to customer is tommorow so this is not good.

Can't boot if SATA Config changed from IDE to RAID

My goal is to create a non-bootable RAID1 mirror with two 320GB extra disks (plugged into SATA 5&6). The boot disk is a Corsair 120MB SSD. The manual that came with the A75A-G55 board says to use raid, first change the SATA Configuration from IDE (the default) to RAID.
Once the RAID selection is made, a new option for Legacy ROM or UEFI Driver shows up. I left the choice at Legacy ROM. Saved settings and exited. During the reset then something new pops up quickly having to do, I suppose with the RAID config, then the regular POST pops through, but then can't boot to Windows.
When I went back to change the BIOS SATA Config back to IDE, I noticed that none of the SATA ports show drives. After setting the SATA config back to IDE, everything seems to go back to normal. I must be missing something significant, but the instructions in the manual that came with the board are pretty simple. On the other hand, the manual doesn't say anthing at all about the SATA configuration options.
I checked the RAID FAQ, but it seems to be oriented to NVIDIA. Nothing there about AMD raid that I could see and no mention of bios settings that looked like this. I have come across mention of an AMD raid manager software (RAIDXpert?) in some other browsing. Should I get that and use it, or will I still have to straighten out this IDE/RAID thing first?
Thank you for your help,
John

As far as I can tell, the A75A-G55 does not support RAID with WindowsXP no matter what the chips are and sales literature says. I've been running around with this too long and still have nothing to show for it.
If anyone has actually been successful with installing a "data" RAID (not a boot disk) on this motherboard I'm all ears, but I don't think such a critter exists.
Here is what I've done tonight.
Set BIOS to RAID, Legacy ROM, save & exit
Cntl-F to enter Option ROM utility
All drives show up, use the utility to create an LD named FamRm_Array from two 320GB drives, save and reboot.
Windows doesn't boot, resets
Del key to enter bios
Main tab shows no SATA drives - all are "Not Present"
Boot tab shows boot option for hard disk as "Hard Disk: FamRm_Array"
(no sign of the Corsair boot disk)
Advanced tab - selected SATA Mode - IDE, save & exit
Got the "Windows didn't start last time" screen, selected "start normally" and Windows came up OK.
Checked the status of the disks with Disk Manager and both 320GB disks show up individually as unallocated, no indication of an array.
Tried again with reboot, selected RAID in bios, save & exit
F11 to enter boot menu - both the Corsair and FamRm_Array are options. Picked Corsair.
Can't boot to windows, reset
Cntl-F to option ROM, array still configured OK, escape and reset
Del to BIOS again - No SATA disks shown, boot tab shows Hard disk:FamRm_Array
F11 to boot menu again, pick Corsair again.
Still can't boot
Del to bios again, boot tab still shows HardDisk:FamRm_Array, no sign of Corsair as any option or priority.
Changed back to SATA Mode IDE, Windows boots fine.
Giving up on a disk array with this board and software. Either it just doesn't work, or the process required is so mysterious and undocumented that the effect is the same - doesn't work.
I'll check back a few times over the next few days to see if anyone points out a major flaw in what I did, but I have no real hope it will ever work.
John

NEO4 Plat Sli SIL3231 Raid problem - Can't boot after BIOS Flash!

Hi, I have and Neo4 Platinum SLI. I had "the problem" a while back with the nVida raid where there was a hang on shutdown. I then created a RAID0 using my two Rators on the SIL3132 controller, and have three hitachi drives hooked up to SATA1 - SATA3. Back then, I had trouble getting my SIL3132 array to be the main boot volume. I could boot when no other drives were attached, but as soon as I attached them, I get the boot disk error after post. Somehow I got it to work, but not think this time, I flashed the BIOS and ran into the same problems, as the BIOS got reset.
First, I went in and re-enabled RAID on the sil3132 controller, and change the boot order to have the RAID voluime be the first boot device, and my other drivers be the next on down the line. Upon rebooting, my system hangs after verifying DMI pool at a blanksscreen for 5 - 10 minutes then gives my the "missing HAL.dll error". if I go back into the BIOS and disable SATA1/SATA2 and SATA3/SATA4 my computer boots just fine. I even completley disconnected my three drives an my system boots just fine. I have searched these forums and could not find anything close to my issue and wondered if it is something I am just missing in the setup. I will say that at POST my IDE devices has always read:
IDE Primary Master [None]
IDE Secondary Master [None]
IDE Primary Slave (my first DVD/R drive)
IDE Secondary Slave (My second DVD/R drive)
IDE Third Master (a 250gb drive)
IDE Fourth Master (a 250gb drive)
IDE Fifth Master (a 250gb drive)
IDE Sixth Master [None]
Is this normal? all my hard drives are SATA. the raptors and three SATAII drives.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Since the Nvida raid problem seems to have been fixed (as far as I read) I would like to go back to using the nVidia raid controller. I just need to back up my system first!
Thanks in advance.
J

Jkmet,
I have noted the same problem, with a USB Pen drive.
If I leave it plugged in and shut down, the next time I cold boot it tries to boot for the pen drive. What I found out the any time you add a drive before booting the BIOS places it at the top of the Hard Drive Priority list making it the boot drive. Same thing happens when I plug in a new SATA and does not mater where it is connected. So, what I have to do any time you add a drive with the power off you have to boot to BIOS reset the Hard drive priority list, then save, exit and reboot to boot from you windows drive.
I am sure this is a BIOS Bug, but MSI states that the way it should would work.
Roger
When submitting a problem, include a complete list of your system components; include part numbers, all Power Supply Voltages, and their output ratings. It is almost impossible to estimate what your problem is without knowing something about it. Here is the link to the web site.

I cannot install windows 7 x64 with AMD/ASUS RAID driver

Trying to install Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on an ASUS M5A97 mobo with AMD SB850 RAID, two WD 750GB drives configured as RAID 0. No drives are recognized by W7 install, so I choose Load Drivers. I put the drivers on a USB stick. Install finds the drivers there,
starts loading them, then comes back with "Installing an unsigned 64 bit driver is not supported and may result in an unstable Windows installation." I downloaded the latest drivers from ASUS website which are WHQL certified (as are the one's on the motherboard
disk). I saw other posts that recommend clicking Repair instead of Install, but I don't see where that option is. All I am given as options are Upgrade or Install. Choosing Upgrade tells me to boot Windows first. But this is a brand new install so...
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Da Bomb

Hi guys,
I have been struggling with the same issue.
Win7 x64. Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 Mobo with Intel core i7-3930K at 3.20 GHz
Marvell 88SE9172 SATA RAID controller with two Hitachi 500 GB spinning disks configured as RAID1
Windows would get to the point of asking for a mass storage drive. It would not see the RAID I had created.
Tried every driver I could find. Tried drivers from the "Station Drivers" website. Tried Marvell drivers for the same chip from the ASUS website. No luck. Tried loading from CD as well as USB flash drive. Always the same result... Windows would find
the drivers appropriate for the hardware found, I would select the RAID version, and after a few seconds, would report that the drivers were unsigned, and the installation was not supported for 64-bit drivers. Clicking OK would take me back to the load drivers
display with no new drives listed in the available drives window.
I tried hitting F8 during startup, and selected the "allow install of unsigned drivers option". That didn't do ANYTHING. Still the same error.
Someone suggested putting the drivers in the root directory. That didn't work. I also disabled all other drives except one CD rom and a USB drive and made sure that my RAID array was the first drive in the boot list.
Tried doing a windows repair, as someone else suggested. (This is an option that is available on the install disk I am using. It's enabled as part of EMS (emergency management services) in setup. Anyway, this was reported to be a workaround
to the signed driver issue. It would allow me to browse to the individual files, but no matter which one I selected, the response was "cannot find hardware appropriate to the driver selected" or some such nonesense. So I gave up on that.
Doing the install with the controller in IDE mode with just one drive connected, would result is Windows installing without a hitch. The problem was clearly when I presented 64-bit windows with a controller in RAID mode.
Long story less long, here's what worked for me....
Out of desperation, I began trying other subfolders in the driver lists. The Gigabyte manual indicated that the AMD64 subfolder was the correct one for the Marvell controller, when using RAID mode with 64-bit Windows. After trying every subfolder of
every driver I could find, the driver in the i386 folder actually worked. It initially came back with the same error about unsigned drivers, but after clicking OK, my RAID drive showed up in the list. I have been able to partition and format
the drive from within Windows setup, and am continuing with the install now. Hopefully won't be any problems booting from the drive post install, but so far it looks good, and I'm relieved that I was able to get it this far.
The whole process has been one of the most frustrating computing experiences I've ever had. This is what it was like back in the 90's when building PCs from scratch. I'm amazed that in this day and age the process is still so poorly documented
and filled with potholes, traps and caveats. Shame on the entire PC industry for allowing this to continue. I'm not asking that they jump in and try to automate it and do all the thinking for me (their solution for everything lately)...all I'm asking for it
clear, concise and accurate INFORMATION.
With the right information, and software that provides accurate feedback, this would all be easy...and even fun.
Hope this helps someone faced with the same problem.

Can I install boot camp on a machine with a Software Raid-0?

I have a machine with a software Raid-0 running Snow Leopard. I'd like to install Boot Camp but I only have 2 SATA hard drives. Windows does not need to run in a RAID on this machine and I'm fine partitioning both drives so that I have a 30GB Windows 7 partition. Both drives are 500GB each.
Can I partition each drive with -30GB run a software raid and still use bootcamp?
Please let me know.

No, and 30GB is too small for Windows 7 64-bit Pro for your Mac.
Get a 3rd drive. Assuming this is a Mac Pro you have 4 internal drive bays.

Which is better, Raid 0 with two hdds or 1 ssd?

Hi,
I have a macbook pro Mid 2010 with two open hard drive bays (thanks to the mce optibay.) I was wondering if it would be better to put two caviar black hard drives in raid 0 on my macbook pro, or have one vertex 2 drive as a boot/applications drive and another data drive.
Thanks
Sam

I understood what the hard-drive-in-optibay meant. Regardless, it's still two platter-based hard drives versus an SSD. An SSD will be faster in your situation. If you had a lot of platter-drives in RAID0 and you had some sort of hardware based RAID controller with battery-backed cache, then maybe, possible, potentially, that (really expensive) platter-based RAID0 could be as fast as a SSD. You don't have that and can't put that in a notebook, so it ain't gonna happen for you.
Now add to the mix, the fact that RAID0 will lose data if any one of the drives in the array fails. You have two drives in RAID0 versus one drive in a non-RAID. The RAID is twice as likely to have a drive failure just because you have more drives. If you made the RAID from two SSD drives, which are more reliable than platter-based drives, then you're got something interesting. But you're still twice as likely to have a SSD-RAID0 array failure compared to a single non-RAID SSD. (And more than twice if it's platter-based drives in the RAID0 versus a single non-RAID SSD.) So it's up to you to determing how much risk you are willing to take...and how much you can afford.
Also note that some Macbook and Macbook Pro models have slower performance on the SATA port for the optical drive. (One assumes Apple tried to save a few dollars and put in a older, slower SATA controller for the optical drive.) I don't know exactly which models but if yours is one of those, then you may get uneven performance on your RAID0. Whether that is noticable or acceptable to you, will depend on a lot of things that you won't know until you try. (e.g.: model of drive, apps you're using.)
And it's good that "backup is easy for you." With RAID0 for the boot volume, you're that much more likely to have a failed boot volume. (IOW, can't boot the Mac at all, which means you'll be using that easily made backup a lot. ) Ideally, workstations that used RAID0 used them for the data, not for the OS. For example, in video editing, the scratch disk needs to be fast, but could be RAID0 because you "threw away" whatever was on the scratch disk after you were done editing, and presumably saved/copied the final edited product to another archival drive. But the OS was on a typical single drive non-RAID (or a RAID1 or RAID5 if necessary,) not on a single RAID0 array for both OS and data.
In your situation, you can't separate the OS and data onto separate RAID arrays, so in general, RAID0 is NOT what you want, regardless of whether you use SSDs or platter-based hard drives. But again, only you can determine how much risk and cost you're willing to gamble with.

Best option for RAID 5 with 4 drives?

I have been thinking about doing a RAID 5 setup with 4 1TB drives.
My motherboard has enough intel SATA ports to run one through its chipset, but I've heard that can be problematic and wont perform as well.
What would be the best budget option for a small RAID? Are there any affordable RAID cards out there that would fit my needs? I could probably part with $300 for a card. I'll get 4 WD RE4 drives for the raid.
I will have a backup of this data so that's not a problem.

Hi Paul,
Areca ARC-1320-8i seems like the best option - or a variation of it (like ARC-1320-4i4x) - as long as you get four internal ports. It's right around $300.
That said, some of my clients run Intel RST RAID5 on four drives for some time, and it actually performs well:
(Personally I think software and hybrid RAIDs are the future of RAID technology: much more flexible than hardware RAID; potentially faster as well given that they have access to all of computer resources rather than just a dedicated processor. The latest iteration of RST, for example, allow SSDs for caching of RAID volumes.)
For my personal system, I use a $200 CineRAID H458 box with four Hitachi Deskstars in RAID5, which is a very inexpensive option for an external RAID:
Sure, it's rather slow; fast enough for my purposes though, and is highly portable, unlike any config with an internal RAID controller.
If I need something seriously faster (yet on a budget), I'd use something like this:

Hardware Raid 1 with 890GXM-G54

I have just built a new system with Win 7 Pro and the 890GXM-G65. I have a SSD for the boot drive, I'm using ACHI for the SDD. Trying to get two identical HDDs setup in hardware RAID 1 for data storage. I have loaded the AMD RAID drivers from the MSI site. I setup the array from the BIOS by switching out the ACHI option to RAID. I switched back to ACHI so the system would boot off the SSD.
In Win7 Pro, I formatted the drives and indicated a mirror. Am I only getting a software non-bootable RAID solution? I would like to use a hardware RAID if at all possible.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
drob9876

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I switched back to ACHI so the system would boot off the SSD.
When you switch back to AHCI, the controller is no longer in RAID Mode...
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I would like to use a hardware RAID if at all possible.
Well, first of all, 99% of all chipset integrated RAID Suppport solution are soft-RAIDs and no true hardware RAID Solutions. In any case, your controller needs to remain in RAID mode to properly support the volume your created.

SATA RAID conflics with POMISE T3 RAID Bios

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