Hello again people, and a belated Happy New Year from northern Romania,
Following advice here, the Noctua downflow HSF has finally resolved the CPU cooling noise under load and simultaneously cooled surrounding components. The system is so quiet now I can now hear the barely audible F4's low oscillation of the internal aluminium drive cage (cue rubber mounting joke variations...)
Since finally getting the new machine stable and apparently playing nicely with Win7, I am now sorting out the niggles and refinements rather than pulling hair out (Win 7 Adventures/Compatibilities aside). Much of the official assistance is non-existent or reminiscent of a North Indian Callcentre, so this forum is a goldmine which is informed and educational.
At the moment, I have two fixed mounted F4-320's in Raid1(AMD) on SATA-3_0&1 running Win7/64 (I just did it this way after 3 laboriously failed OS installs). It seems to be working reliably atm, but I am not sure now if the redundancy is worth the current boot delay. Maybe reset as RAID0 or simple cloning would make more sense. Another one for the list of to do's.....
4 other SATA drives are ultimately to be connected (last 2no F4-204UI arrive next week) in a front accessible cage, where I hoped to make them removeable (for no compelling reason other than the facility to do so is a case feature). At the moment, the two WD's connected to 3_2&3 do not show up as removeable, I presume because of the Raid1 settings.
The case front has a E-SATA port (all my current external drives are USB2).
The borrowed IDE-DVDRW I was planning to replace with a Bluray combo SATA drive, but current opinion seems to be that this drive should be set up as IDE rather than SATA.
So in all I have 7 drives and 1 future E-Sata port to juggle with, but I note that there are several issues over RAID/SATA/AHCI/DVDROM configurations on the two SATA channels for this board, so I would like some advice on what/where drive configurations.
I read in one post of a similar question where a solution was suggested moving the Raid drives from 3_0&1 to the GSata ports 6&7, as it would be seen as a Raid drive immediately, and would free up 3_0-6 to operate in AHCI. Is it really that simple?
AHCI seems to cause ROM drive issues, but AHCI enabes hot swap, so I'm a bit puzzled how they can be set up on SATA3.
Another post said that 3_0-6 could be independently enabled/disabled, but I could find no such technique available from Bios FF....
Now where did I leave those elastic bands?......
