# Asus p5w raid

## Bornio

I just bought the ASUS P5B motherboard and it has  sata ports and one sata raid port.

i cant figure out how to make hardware raid, whenever i plug one hd into the raid, it will only see it, and not the other one connected to the sata ports.

help please!

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## kernelOfTruth

Hi ,

in your subject you wrote p5w, in your message you wrote p5b, so which board do you own ?   :Wink: 

if you have p5w dh deluxe:

on which raid controller are both harddrives?

the intel ICH7R & Jmicron both own a boot rom

according to manual the shortcuts are CTRL + I (intel) and CTRL + J (jmicron), then you'll be able to set up a raid 

WARNING: you'll lose all your data on both harddrives with each change of your raid-configuration

the easiest approach would be:

plug in both drives to the silicon image (EZ-Backup- Raid) Controller and set (via jumper ) to raid0 or raid1, the performance is a little weaker, though

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## NeddySeagoon

Bornio,

You don't have hardware raid. you have a choice of BIOS software raid (fake raid) or kernel software raid.

Your only excuse for using BIOS software raid is that both windows and linix must share the raid.

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## kernelOfTruth

@NeddySeagoon:

I think if Bornio owns the p5w (the same like mine) there's something like a hardware raid (I'm not quite sure): in this solution raid-mode is selected via hardware

Update:

ah, ok, it actually is a hardware raid:

 *Quote:*   

> Intel ICH7R South Bridge:
> 
> *1 x UltraDMA 100/66/33
> 
> *3 x Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s with Intel? Matrix Storage Technology with RAID 0, 1, 5 support
> ...

 

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## NeddySeagoon

Bornio, 

It really is hardware raid (from the device data sheet) and Silicon Image say there is a Linux driver for Fedora Core,

I couldn't find it on their website though. That many well mean its not in the vanillia kernel.

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## Bornio

Sorry! I ment P5B motherboard! 

Any suggestions?

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## kernelOfTruth

is it this one ?

if yes, then welcome on board   :Rolling Eyes: 

a lot of people (me included) are trying to get it (Jmicron controller) to run properly

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## Bornio

Its the same, but not the Delux version.

The problem is, I am unable to make the raid controller to see both HDs in the HD list for the RAID.

I can see them only in SATA.

I have 4 SATA ports and 1 special RAID port onboard (the delux is same, but has 6 normal SATA ports).

But only the HD I connect to the RAID port gets listed.

How did you connect it?

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## kernelOfTruth

Oh, I think I should have made clear: I own the p5w dh deluxe

but it should have the same JMicron chipset (sorry for my bad English) like on P5B

I simply connected both to the (IDE) channel (they are IDE-drives) & compiled in the JMICRON-IDE-support but omitted Jmicron-ATA-Non-AHCI-Support

So I guess, I have no help for you:

since in S-ATA/AHCI/native mode (I haven't tried ide-raid, since I don't want to lose all my data on those 2 hdd   :Rolling Eyes:  ) the detection takes pretty long therefore I set the controller to "basic"  

=> there seems to be an ISSUE with this controller in AHCI mode which should be corrected in final 2.6.18-release

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## Bornio

ASUS dissapointed big time.

As you can see in this link: http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20060823031544574&board_id=1&model=P5B&page=1&SLanguage=en-us , the ASUS mobo is useless for any RAID activities.

I am switching to GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 motherboard, which even has Linux drivers.

Thanks for the help!!!

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## castor_fou

Bornio,

can you give us the feedback with your Gigabyte mobo ?

I am in the same situation, I would like to setup HW raid with a P965 chipset mobo

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## Bornio

Of course!

Well, it seems that all the motherboards are a bit disspointing since none of them has a real RAID driver, and only have a FAKE-RAID (aka: BIOS-RAID).

What this means is that it is not transpernt to the OS.

Because windows needs special floppy drivers during install for the controller I was unable to install the RAID, and gave up on it, for now, altogether.

If you don't need dual-boot you should have no problems.

On a side note, there is another problem with with all the new motherboard: IRQ handling.

You pretty much have to boot using 'all-generic-ide' paramter in the kernel, and disable MSI-PCI in the kernel which causes problems with misc. devices (such as the HD-INTEL sound card).

Otherwise, it works very nicly, and the system is amazingly fast and easy to overclock using the Gigabyte C.I.B which does automatic overclocking depending on your settings.

Overall, other then the lack of real RAID in both motherboards, they perform great.

Hopefully all the IRQ problems will be solved in the next kernel .18. But whe using "all-generic-ide" and disabling "MSI-PCI" there are no "real" problems, other then the kernel complaining about "confused drives"

hope it helps, and sorry for the spelling (i am at work)

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## castor_fou

thank you for this feedback, I don't need for dualboot so maybe a soft raid is the solution you are right.

maybe I will wait for the coming nvidia chipset for dual core.

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## OgRo

I'm a completelly nOOb to RAID, so sorry if that's a stupid question.

if that's a bios raid it's impossible to make both linux and windows see the same raid-set?

any of you got this p5b raid working?

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## NeddySeagoon

OgRo,

Its possible.

Linux supports three sorts of RAID.

Kernel Raid

BIOS (Fake Raid)

Real Hardware RaidWindows can use BIOS (Fake Raid)

Real Hardware Raid

If you have real hardware raid, you know about it from the hole in your wallet.

Linux can use dmraid to access BIOS fakeraid, so that both Windows and Linux can share a raid set.

Do read our dmraid sticky - its not as easy as its supposed to be to set up at the moment.

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## OgRo

thx NeddySeagoon, I'm gonna try this later.

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## t0mcat

the silicon 4723, alias ez backup on asus mboards, is actually a small true-hardware raid processor, and apparently it is totally driverless (even if i don't understand how could that be).

http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=64

and it's cheap.

so maybe in the near future having a decent raid on a linux desktop won't be 3ware=300$=screaming-wallet anymore

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## Kollin

 *t0mcat wrote:*   

> the silicon 4723, alias ez backup on asus mboards, is actually a small true-hardware raid processor, and apparently it is totally driveless (even if i don't understand how could that be).
> 
> 

 

Herå is how : http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20060924103502370&board_id=1&model=P5W+DH+Deluxe&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

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## t0mcat

seems far from being decent as i initially thought  :Sad: 

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## drescherjm

Ok from the link:

 *Quote:*   

> Supports modes:
> 
>     * Safe/RAID 1
> 
>     * Fast/RAID0
> ...

 

I would not really consider this in the same class as a true hardware raid card as almost no processing is needed for any of these modes.

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