GA-P55A-UD3 Hard Drive Issues

[Easysky]

Have newly built P55A-UD3 computer with two WD 1TB Blacks configured as Raid 1 on the Marvel chip. There is a WD 150 GB Rapter (Boot Drive) and two SATA optical drives on the Intel chip. On the surface, everything appears okay. However, the operating system (Win7 Pro) thinks the Raid drives are an external SATA drive. Also, Acronis backup software doesn't find all the drives during recovery. Have found apparent solutions involving changes to the registery, which I prefer not to attempt.

After searching the forums, and hearing of the problems with the Marvel chip, here is my plan.

Move the WD Raptor or a new WD Black SATA 3 hard drive to the Marvel chip and reinstall Win7 Pro.
Build a Raid 1 drive on the Intell chip with the two WD Blacks.

Will I have problems with the two SATA optical drives if the Intel chip is set to Raid?

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum. Sorry for the delay in replying but I have been busy today.

Firstly if you have the new Western Digital Black SATA3 6GBs hard drives you will be tempting fate if you install them in a RIAD configuration because they don't support TLER anymore unless you pay extra for the Enterprise versions. TLER if you are not familiar with it is Time Limited Error Recovery and basically just means that when starting up the drive wont fail because the initiation is a bit slow.

The Marvell 9128 SATA3 controller isn't good with RAID either as you have already noticed from other posts. So you made the right choice to move them from there.

The Acronis software will have a problem if you have the drives set to AHCI instead of RAID I think.

The optical drive ports you can set to IDE so there shouldn't be any problem with them.

[Easysky]

Thank you for the response. I have made the change and everything works. The Raid setup was removed from the Marvel chip. The chip interface was changed from Raid to AHCI and the "C" drive was attached. Win7 booted and new drivers automatically installed. The "C" drive was inproperly viewed as an eSATA. I just changed the policy to not allow it to be removed. Next I reattached the two WD Blacks and setup Raid on the Intel chip. The Acronis software was able to find all drives. I than attached another drive to simulate replacing a failed "C" drive. It was found when the system was booted from an Acronis rescue CD.

All is well, thanks to this forum.

[Dark Mantis]

Well that's good news and only too happy to have been of help.