Motherboards Chipset limitations and RAID

[Ant1981]

On pretty much every Asus motherboard I've looked at, due to chipset limitations, when RAID is enabled on a set SATA ports, all ports within that set are in RAID mode.

Now, as most have one set of 4 SATA 3, and two seperate sets of SATA 6, this means I can't RAID 0 systems drives AND RAID 1 data drives. It's one or the other.

Now, could this change with a BIOS update later or is it a permanant physical thing with chipsets?

I assume this affects other manufactures MBs as it's a chipset issue, Intel etc.

[dunx]

My Asus MoBo has numerous SATA/SAS controllers, each completely separate in operation. Check the documentation for yours.

HTH

dunx

[Ant1981]

I have dunx and what I said above is what it said.

What model board do you have? Mine is the P67 Sabretooth.

[Bindibadgi]

Your SATA ports are split across two controllers: Marvell and Intel.

Intel provides 4x SATA 3Gbps and 2x SATA 6Gbps
Marvell provides 2x SATA 6Gbps

Each has their own RAID Firmware and are separate to one another in the physical sense, so if you use their firmware to setup RAID then you cannot blend it between the two chipsets. You can however blend what you want between all the six Intel SATA ports, regardless of 6 or 3Gbps: You can run separate RAID 0 and RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 0/1 etc

If you setup software RAID within Windows it doesn't matter what chipset or port you plug it into. For this you IGNORE the SATA port Firmware and just set them to standard ACHI mode, then you configure it all within Windows. This is useful because you can set a RAID 0 for performance in the firmware, then RAID 1 in Windows across the rest of the drives, regardless of what they are plugged into. The limitation is that you obviously cannot install Windows onto a software RAID disk, as it's setup is in Windows!