Raid controller problems on D845PBET2; and its solvation...

Hi everyone!
My first topic...
I share this info with the hope for some feedback regarding this
matter.

I have 2 computers with D845PEBT2 motherboards and 2 Seagate Barracuda
V SATA drives installed on eatch board. They run with XP and would
display the exact same problems; corrupting data and breaking
raid-sets. Since I hade 2 computers to "lab" with I soon could exlude
the drives as source of this problem. After some research I found it
to be the Silicon Image on-board RAID controller that caused the
problem (altough massively denied by Intel...) At first I thought it
might be the BIOS (or separate ROM for the controller) causing the
problem, but after reading an old Google thread about Intel drivers
for this particular board I suspected the SATA RAID driver! So I
started looking at the Silicon Image website for possible drivers and
a couple of weeks ago I got lucky! SI released new "general" drivers
for their controller chip in question. I installed this and it seems
to work perfectly, except for some marginal reduction in performance
(speed).

Have anyone out there any additional info regarding this (I might ad
that this is a SHORT version of the actual events... ;/ )? I have had
some contact with the people at Intels motherboard
evaluation/development/support. Nobody seems to have heard of this
problem, and they tell me that no dates are set for new drivers or ROM
code...

Well, take care and don't spend ALL your time at the computer. ;D
/Lex Lee

"Lex Lee" wrote in message om...
Hi everyone!
My first topic...
I share this info with the hope for some feedback regarding this
matter.

I have 2 computers with D845PEBT2 motherboards and 2 Seagate Barracuda
V SATA drives installed on eatch board. They run with XP and would
display the exact same problems; corrupting data and breaking
raid-sets. Since I hade 2 computers to "lab" with I soon could exlude
the drives as source of this problem. After some research I found it
to be the Silicon Image on-board RAID controller that caused the
problem (altough massively denied by Intel...) At first I thought it
might be the BIOS (or separate ROM for the controller) causing the
problem, but after reading an old Google thread about Intel drivers
for this particular board I suspected the SATA RAID driver! So I
started looking at the Silicon Image website for possible drivers and
a couple of weeks ago I got lucky! SI released new "general" drivers
for their controller chip in question. I installed this and it seems
to work perfectly, except for some marginal reduction in performance
(speed).

Have anyone out there any additional info regarding this (I might ad
that this is a SHORT version of the actual events... ;/ )? I have had
some contact with the people at Intels motherboard
evaluation/development/support. Nobody seems to have heard of this
problem, and they tell me that no dates are set for new drivers or ROM
code...

Well, take care and don't spend ALL your time at the computer. ;D
/Lex Lee

Did you perform a full surface scan on all drives? I bought a pair of Baracuda Vs last week and one of them had been
dropped on a hard surface prior to packaging. Needless to say the Raid set didn't work;~((
I'm actually wondering if a Raid set is worthwhile anyway? The Barracuda V seems very fast already so I'll see how raid
goes when I get the replacement but I may decide to run them as 2 separate drives to keep things simple.

Rod

Hi Rod!
I´ve done a full scan of the drives in one of the computers, and they
seems to be in perfect condition but still wouldn't work. And as I
explained, with the general driver from SI they do perform perfect
eccept from what seems to be some what slower responce. But They still
deliver more than enough speed for my applications (I run a music
recording studio so I push my drives pretty hard).
I run RAID1, mirrored volume, for security reasons. But just like you
I've gone over to just have 2 stand alone drives, and do ordinary
backups... The thing is that even if I run my drives as regular,
singel-non-raid-sata drives, they will fail if I use the Intel driver.
Data will be corrupted on a non predictabel basis, sometimes even in
the index files causing "dissaperance" of files on your drives. This
can cause a total breakdown if you run your system on the SATA drive
(witch I did...)With a non repairable system partision as the result.
No fun at all... :/

Regards
/Lex

"Lex Lee" wrote in message m...
Hi Rod!
I´ve done a full scan of the drives in one of the computers, and they
seems to be in perfect condition but still wouldn't work. And as I
explained, with the general driver from SI they do perform perfect
eccept from what seems to be some what slower responce. But They still
deliver more than enough speed for my applications (I run a music
recording studio so I push my drives pretty hard).
I run RAID1, mirrored volume, for security reasons. But just like you
I've gone over to just have 2 stand alone drives, and do ordinary
backups... The thing is that even if I run my drives as regular,
singel-non-raid-sata drives, they will fail if I use the Intel driver.
Data will be corrupted on a non predictabel basis, sometimes even in
the index files causing "dissaperance" of files on your drives. This
can cause a total breakdown if you run your system on the SATA drive
(witch I did...)With a non repairable system partision as the result.
No fun at all... :/

ATM I'm leaving my system on a conventional IDE drive 'til I have more experience of how the SATA drives perform - just
using them as a file dump at present.

Rod