Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Why can't my computer detect the 6th Sata drive?

<< < (3/5) > >>

f0dder:
Ah yes, hotswap is probably AHCI-only as well.

Dunno how much NCQ is worth - for some workloads, and especially with the early NCQ implementations, people reported it could slow down things, and could rise CPU usage noticably. I haven't done any benchmarks on my system, but run in AHCI mode because I slipstreamed the drivers and figured it'd either be unnoticeable or give an advantage every now and then... and haven't read up on the issue in a while.

The whole boot device issue is one of the things I find most unfortunate about the low-level parts of Windows. Can live with the system not wanting to boot when the driver is wrong, but it's too much bother getting an existing system to a new <kind of> boot device...

f0dder:
Most (if not all) RAID controllers have a JBOD mode. JBOD stands for Just a Bunch Of Drives. As far as I know the RAID controller will not enable any RAID functionality on its controller that way. See the manual that came with the motherboard.-Shades (July 29, 2009, 10:42 PM)
--- End quote ---
AFAIK JBOD concatenates the drives to one big, without doing any kind of striping or other trickery... but you still don't get to access the individual drive, and a single disk failing can course of a lot of interesting issues.

4wd:
So should I go through the work and switch everything to AHCI?-superboyac (July 29, 2009, 10:38 PM)
--- End quote ---

Yes, it's easy enough to do without doing a lot of reinstalling:
1) Switch the GSATA back to IDE mode and move your boot drive onto it.  Leave the Intel in AHCI mode.
2) Boot the computer and hit F12, (normally for Gigabyte), to select your boot drive.
3) When it boots up it will detect the Intel SATA in AHCI and ask for the drivers.
4) When it's finished installing you can power down and move your boot drive back to the Intel SATA and change the GSATA back to AHCI.
5) When you boot up again you'll probably be asked for AHCI drivers for the GSATA.

Another way:
If it's anything like my Gigabyte board, the last two of the South Bridge SATA connectors, (Intel for you, ATI for me), can be individually swapped between 'IDE mode' and 'Same as SATA'.
Install the boot drive on one of those, (S2_4 or S2_5), mark it as IDE mode in BIOS while leaving the rest as AHCI when it boots up it will ask for the AHCI driver, on the next boot go into BIOS and change S2_4/5 to 'Same as SATA'.

Can live with the system not wanting to boot when the driver is wrong, but it's too much bother getting an existing system to a new <kind of> boot device... -f0dder (July 29, 2009, 10:46 PM)
--- End quote ---

One of the reasons I like the way Gigabyte do it with being able to set SATA2_4/5 in IDE and leave the rest in AHCI until installing is finished - that way it picks up all drivers at install.

What I really hate is the way the freak'n boot order changes when you plug in another drive - is it really so hard to make the BIOS just keep your boot preference no matter how many drives you (un)plug?

superboyac:
Thanks 4wd!  I will have to try that this weekend.  I'm tired now and don't feel like doing all that.  I've saved the instructions.

Innuendo:
Just be aware that some versions of Windows have a bug that if you switch your drive controllers to AHCI that although Windows will go through the motions and ask you for new drivers and what-not the drives won't actually be in AHCI mode as these buggy Windows versions will 'forget' to change the necessary bits in the registry and that'll all have to be done by hand if you want your drives to be in AHCI mode.

I had a friend who bought an eSATA enclosure and wanted to you the hot-swap feature if I am remembering correctly. His PC had been set up in compatibility mode & he needed to change to AHCI mode for everything to work right. It was an adventure of discovery for him.

I'll check later and see if I still have his old emails on the subject, but I do definitely recall it wasn't a "change the setting in your BIOS, reboot, and your fixed" kind of deal.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page