Asus A8N-Sli Deluxe, and Onboard SATA Drivers

I have bought the Asus A8N-Sli Deluxe

I have equipped it with:

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Rev. E3 (Venice Core)
OCZ 2 GB kit PC3200 400 MHz Performance (2x1 GB)
HiTech X300SE 128MB PciE,

I have one System Disk - a Maxtor 9 160 GB SATA Disk
I have one Disk for Backup - a Seagate 250 GB SATA Disk.

I have 6 x 250 GB Seagate SATA disks in a Windows XP Soft Raid 5
(Modified like:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage.../raid5-01.html).

I bought the A8N-Sli Deluxe because it has 8 Sata Ports. According to
the manuals they can all be set up as SATA (Individual SATA disks,
which I needed to run 6 Disks as soft raid in Windows)

I had got the 6 disks for my raid. And since there was 608 GB data I
needed to copy to my new raid fast, since I had sold the 3 HD's with
the data on and I couldn't get an Athlon with the Venice core. I had
borrowed a friend's computer. Here I connected the six drives, set
them up as Raid 5 in windows and formatted them (17 hours), then I
copied the data across (16 hours) - Not a single fault on his Asus
P4C800-E rev. 2 motherboard with at Pentium processor during the whole
process.

Well it turned out to be more difficult than I ever imagined. In the
manual it stated that he SIL 3114 controller could run in SATA mode,
but the option wasn't in the BIOS. According to other helpful users it
had been removed in rev. 1003 of the BIOS, while I had rev. 1008 (and
to run with the Venice core I could go no further down than rev.
1007). Well I have contacted Asus, they have instructed me to install
the SI3114r driver instead of the SI3114r5 drivers which normally is
installed and set the Controller as JBOD on the SIL3114 controller.
But this gives me an Error Code (10), and Asus has not come back with
an answer - And it won't run. I have NOT got it to work - And I could
not connect my windows soft raid 5 to this controller.

The NVidia controller is set up as a SATA controller in BIOS.

I bought a Promise SATA II 150 TX4 controller card. I connected it in
a PCI slot and connected my 6 Raid 5 disks.

Well I soon got the BSOD, it was most often with a 0x000000F4
(0X00000003 ………) fault, which is a driver, which is vital to windows
stopped working. The Raid got corrupt each time and whenever I started
the Computer it would start to regenerate the soft Raid 5 disks - it
would never finish regenerating (which takes about 6 hours), it would
always BSOD with the 0x000000F4 on me at anything between 0 and 30 %
of Regenerating. I tried to reinstall. I tried different drivers. I
tried to enable and disable Write cache. To no avail. If I didn't
install the NVidai WHQL SW drivers, then the computer would not BSOD
with a 0x000000F4 fault, but start to work slower and slower and
slower … And literally come to a halt. One by one the processes would
'stop responding' and the computer worked slower and slower. This
process would take up to 20 minutes. At the end only the reset bottom
could get me in contact with the computer

Fortunately my friend is on holiday, so I could regenerate the raid on
his computer (took 6 hours each time!!) - Never one fault and I've
done it 5 times on his computer. I used my own Promise SATA II 150 TX4
(and later also the SIL 3112 controller), just to verify that it would
work on his computer.

I read 'on the net' on the net that BOTH controllers on this board are
'bad', so I had another PCI SATA Sil3112 2 port controller. I then
tried to use this controller and the Promise for my 6 disk raid. But I
still had my one Maxtor 9 160 GB SATA disk on the NVidia SATA
controller on the motherboard. I have another computer with a 160 GB
IDE drive, I then ghosted my system from the SATA drive to this IDE
drive.

I have then disabled both the onboard NVidia controller and the
onboard SIl 3114 in BIOS, and now I'm running with The Promise SATA II
150 TX4 (4 ports) and SIL3112 (2 ports) and the system disk on the IDE
controller!!

Now the computer works much much faster with disk access, and for the
first 7 hours I've not had a single BSOD. I'll Now try the ultimate
test. I'll disconnect one of the drives from the raid - and then
reconnect it to see if I can go through a full regenerating process
without fault.

Hope this is of use to some one else.

Regards Leif.