8rda6 Pro Raid setup

[piloteer81]

Got the new board today and having a hell of a time setting up a two disk Raid 0 array! I've probably been trying too hard and missing something very simple but anyway...

I'm using the Nvidia Raid for the array which consists of two sata ports. Also available is a Sil3114 chip with another 4 ports on it. All these ports appear in the bios so its a little confusing which ones to use. Think I got that ok but when I go into the nvidia raid setup, create the array, reboot, then go to install windows on it (having loaded the drivers of the boot disk one has to make!) Windows will only show the array as two disks of 80gb each, not the 160gb raid array.

If I go into recovery option and get into 'diskpart' showing the partitions, again it shows two separate disks, not the raid array.
On my old board, the raid setup would create the array and I'd see the array as 160gb when going to install windows on it. I could then create a 160gb partition and format it no trouble.

The disks I am using were part of another raid array on my last board, but I have cleared the data as instructed for previously used disks.

What is most strange is that when I don't install the raid drivers during windows installation (holding down F6) one 80gb drive actually appears in the installation menu!!!!!??? This should not happen as without the drivers, both drives should not be recognised if they are in the raid array and no drivers are installed for it.. surely?

This leads me to think that Nvidia Raid has not properly setup the raid array, or some option is wrong in the bios making one of the drives appear as a standard single sata drive.

Another problem which has been driving me nuts is getting into the bios when raid is enabled. Since I enabled it, when pressing 'del' to enter the bios, when loading Nvidia Raid, the PC stops booting while it searches for a raid array. I've waited 15 mins for it to finish but no luck. Only way to get back into the bios is to wipe the Cmos and start over again, a viscious circle!

I've given up trying to install windows on a raid array for now, but will try again in the next 48hours perhaps by installing windows on a spare hard drive, then creating the array from in windows, or trying the sil3114 chip.

Any advice would be very much appreciated!

[piloteer81]

Well I'm determined to get this thing working! I've installed windows on another drive and I've created and formatted the array on the nvidia chip in windows using Nvraid. All is good so far, just wander why it wouldn't work from 'dos' mode? Hopefully with the array already setup and formatted it may want to play ball when I next try to install windows on it, which will be in about 10 mins!

[Gizmo]

Actually, setup runs from WindowsNT's 'native' mode. It's a fully functional NT kernel, but with a command shell instead of a GUI.

Are you intending to do a RAID0 stripe or or a RAID1 mirror?

[piloteer81]

Was trying to create a stripe 0 array with two disks. I gave up totally on the nvidia chip. Absolutely useless. The Sil 3114 chip worked first time doing exactly the same things I had tried with the nvidia and exactly the same things I did with my old 3112 chip on my last board and indeed my old promise chip on my board before that.

I setup the raid array in windows in the end with windows on another disk obviously. Formatted ok, then went to install windows. It completed the first pass and installed some files, then rebooted to go into the main installation. Then the trouble started again. The raid array just didn't want to be recognised. After a few reboots it eventually recognised it but had an error message. On further inspection it was saying that one drive of the array was missing.---- hadn't touched them .

At this point I gave up and tried the SIL 3114 raid chip. Suprise suprise it works first time and I now have windows running on it, 2 drives in a stripe 0 array. Shame I wasted so much time (8hours) trying to get the nvidia chip to work! Clearly if one chip doesn't work and is pretty damn flakey when its working well, and the other chip works fine first time, I think either my board is duff or a new bios is needed!

After disabling everything to do with Nvidia Raid in the bios, the system ran as smooth as could be, and this even cured the problem of getting into the bios - once you pressed del, in the next post screen, the nvidia chip would search for over 4 minutes for a raid array (whether I had drives connected or not). A bit of a long wait considering most total boot times even from cold are less than 60 seconds these days.

Just seems damn strange thats all. The nvidia raid manual clearly shows how to install windows on the raid volume. Perhaps they'd like to do it on mine!

My board is the first revision I believe, but I downloaded the latest bios today hoping it would solve the problems. Still, it works in a fashion, but I know the nvidia chip is faster than using the pci-based sil 3114.

[Gizmo]

Interesting.......I was first going to say that it sounded like you had a driver problem of some sort, but now I'm not so sure. There is an outside chance it could be a compatibility problem between the nVidia controller and the drives you are using. Other than that, I'm stymied.

[piloteer81]

Yeah me too. Possibley a compatibility issue. Windows is now screaming along on the Sil 3114 chip. I guess Hitachi drives are the most well known and popular so its definitely a possibility. I might raise it with epox on tech support as apart from this the board is great! I see some users in the states already have the 1.2rev board. It would be good to know what changes have been made, especially if they involve the nvidia chip!

One question I would like to ask. If I created the nvidia array in windows, should the nvidia raid setup that appears during the post, detect and show that array too, or are the post raid and windows created raid separate?

I also read that in order for someone to get the sata raid to work they had to disable the ide raid option in the bios. This would also disable the two nvidia ports' raid capability surely? Ah well. Epox Tech if you read this any advise you have would be very much appreciated!

[elzhi]

I have the same problem word for word i even got the motherboard the same day as you , i have 2 Hitachi 60gig Gxp180 ,epox /nvidia need to look into this
. I ordered 2 raptors so i'll check back when i get them.

[warrenwrench]

Hi, I too have a 8RDA6+pro and failed first 3 attempts at the RAID. I found the nvRaid to be tricky. There is a nvRaid manual on the drivers disc that is very good. You do not want to disable either primary or secondary IDE ports. Enable IDE RAID, this opens up another menu. If you are not using the IDE ports for RAID, under the sub menu disable the RAID on each IDE port and enable the RAID on both the SATA ports. This is for the SATA ports attached to the gigabyte MCP chip. Make sure bootROM is enabled. You will have to delete the RAID you created and create a new array. The nvRaid is very powerful. According to nVidia you can use the IDE ports for RAID and also use the the IDE's along with the SATA's for RAID and also include the SI3114 with the others. Haven't tried that yet, but I have two Maxtor SATA 80gig HDD's in a RAID-0 and sandra file system benched them @ 94mps. That is about 14 better than my IC7-G with two Rapters in RAID-0. I hope this helps, I don't have the rig booted at the moment, I'm typing this from memory.

One other thing, when installing the OS give windows setup both drivers on the floppy you create with the drivers disc. It will install a RAID utility in the programs menu.

[EPoX Tech]

This also applies to the EP-8KDA3J, EP-8KDA3+ and EP-8RDA3IPro sold by EPoX here in the UK. RAID needs to be enabled to the extent that the drives aren't seen at POST, but are recognised by the NVRaid instead.

[piloteer81]

Yeah got my head around the millions of drives appearing in the bios! he he! I know the last two are for the nvidia raid so when you enable them, they do not appear in the initial post, as epox tech says, they appear in the nvidia raid setup instead. The setup detects the drives fine and creates the array, but the next time you boot 9 times out of 10 the array says one drive is missing. Otherwise I continued to install windows on the array but of course when you reboot the same problem happens - the array is dead and you can't even select it as the primary hard drive boot device to continue the windows installation.



I did look at the nvidia raid manual on the CD and it was very informative, but I had already been following it word for word and just couldn't crack it. I tried everything - disabling the ide raid channels and enabling the two sata raid channels, disabling the Sil3114 chip, even not having any other ide devices installed at all. I also disabled the parallel port, sound and game port to make sure it wasn't some kind of conflict.

I can only assume that it is a compatibility issue or my board is duff. I'm not saying I'm an ace at raid arrays, but when I got the sil3114 chip working in a stripe array first attempt, it did make me a bit sick!

Would be very good to know if you can get your raptors working elzhi! At least we'd know if its possibly a compatibility issue.

[piloteer81]

SUCCESS!!!! I decided to give it another go and somehow it worked! I say somehow, I just doubled checked everything as I did it, used a brand new floppy disk and made sure both drivers were loaded from the disk during windows installation.

To anyone having problems installing windows on a raid array made on the Nvidia chip, make absolutely sure you load BOTH drivers after pressing F6 to install scsi/raid drivers. You'll need to press 'S' twice firstly to specify the raid driver, and secondly to specify the nvidia storage driver as well. You should then have two drivers present before you click enter to continue intalling windows. This is all in the Nvidia raid manual on the CD, in particular page 28, it is not mentioned in the paper manual and only from page 28 onwards on the pdf manual on the CD. Follow it word for word, if it doesn't work get a new floppy disk and try again!

For some reason I don't think the floppy I had used hadn't copied both drivers, at least not all of the storage driver.

Other things that may have caused my problems are trying to delete the previous raid array off my two disks. I only attempted to do this in the nvidia setup during the boot sequence. This may not have worked and caused problems creating the array on the nvidia chip. If possible delete the array on your previous motherboard before installing the drives on the nvidia chip, if your drives are not new of course. If not I found the sil3114 raid setup a bit more positive and I deleted the array I had been using on that chip and made sure the two drives were seperate.

Swapped them over to the nvidia sata ports, rebooted, created the array and this time their didn't seem to be any problems with drives going missing! Went straight into the windows installation, loaded both drivers and here I am.

Thanks for the support guys, I'm off to enjoy this fantastic board!

[piloteer81]

All running fine - sis benchmark for those who are interested!!

Raid is on the nvidia gigabit chip:

Raid array - (Stripe 0) 2 x hitachi 80gb sata 7k250 = 91mb/s

Single Drive - Hitachi ide 160gb 7k250 = 54mb/s


Raid is on the Sil3114 chip:

Raid array - (Stripe 0) 2 x hitachi 80gb sata 7k250 = 82mb/s

Single Drive - Hitachi ide 160gb 7k250 = 53mb/s


New it was worth it! The nvidia raid rocks!!!

[warrenwrench]

I'm glad to hear you got it to work correctly. I won't be putting Rapters on this board real soon, just can't afford it right now. Hopefully within a month.

[elzhi]

Hey,

I got nvraid working finally, I had to enable LAN soft-off and PCI soft-off
in the Power Mangenmet part of my bios, nVraid really does haul @ss

[elzhi]

heres my raptors in raid_0 64k block

[danrok]

Front Page, elzhi!
http://www.aoaforums.com/

[piloteer81]

Great stuff! I just can't believe how fast this chip is!!! Raptors are out of my price range, well not completely but for the 10% ish performance gain I'd put my money elsewhere! Great results though. See mine below - 16k stripe size 2 x hitachi 7k250 80GB that cost me less than £50 each!

Might try raising my stripe size to 64k tomorrow and see what happens. I was so glad to get it working I didn't think about other settings! Lastly, has anyone noticed a raise in cpu reported temp when upgrading from an 8rda3+ to the 8rda6pro? My last board showed my water cooled cpu @ 32'C idle, now I'm getting 36'c. I've bled it, tried different addative and re-seated the block about 5 times and still get the same!

[danrok]

Originally Posted by piloteer81

Great stuff! I just can't believe how fast this chip is!!! Raptors are out of my price range, well not completely but for the 10% ish performance gain I'd put my money elsewhere! Great results though. See mine below - 16k stripe size 2 x hitachi 7k250 80GB

Did you try any other stripe sizes?

[warrenwrench]

I just helped a friend put a rig togather with a 8RDA6+pro tonight. He is using one Seagate 160gig SATA onchip no RAID Sandra benched 50mb/s. I thought that was good with one drive! Nice scores with the Rapters!