Does anyone have Asus P5K Premium working with RAID?

[fpbear]

I couldn't get my P5K Premium working with the onboard ICH9R RAID controller.

I discovered this is a large scale problem with these boards. In particular, if you have the Intel Q6600 and SATA II drives, the ICH9R RAID will crash Vista install.

Now the interesting question is - does anyone with this combination have ICH9R RAID working? If so what is your configuration? What is your secret?

 

[imported_i2k]

I have it working with the Vista edition.

 

[fpbear]

The P5B Vista does not have this problem, but the P5K Premium does, these are very different models, different chipsets.

So anyone with a P5K Premium that has RAID or SATA II and Q6600 working?

 

[fortunatio]

Alas, I also have NOT had any luck with raid0 configuration (Q6600 on ASUS P5K Deluxe) with my 2 WD Raptor 74GB drives...

Intel Q6600 (B3) @ 3.0 GHz with stock cooler
ASUS P5k Deluxe Wifi AP
2 x 1GB Patriot Extreme Performance DDR2-800 (rated 4-4-4-12)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT dual DVI (fanless Gigabyte SilentPipe II)
Antec Sonata III with Earthwatts PS
Seagate 500 GB sata/300
Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit (utterly awful OS)
addt'l low speed internal chassis fan for cooling the chipset, DRAM and GFX card

I am currently using BIOS default jumperless settings "AUTO" with only the following exceptions:

CPU FSB 333
DRAM Memory Freq 1000
DRAM Timing 5-5-5-15
DRAM Voltage 2.2

Firstly, system runs blazingly fast and stable, and never shuts down. It is also reasonably quiet. I observe 50 degree core temp readings using the ASUS PCProbe (which I understand from this forum may be seriously underreporting the actual temps). Sad to say, my Vista experience has been an unbelieveable drag: virtually nothing installs or works first time. Always lots of fiddling, system updates that continue to reinstall themselves, compatibility issues, etc.

Tried like hell to get my pair of WD raptor 74GBs to play with this ASUS board, but each time I configured them (ie fresh install of Vista) the intel controller would report "drive errors" within a day or two. These drives continue to work just fine back in my old MSI Neo-FSR with a Via controller.

Tried to get two different HDTV subsystems to play with Vista's Media Center with no luck: KWorld's Conexant based PCI 120 HDTV card and Pinnacle's brand new USB based Ultimate HDTV stick - which both claim Vista compatibility. Gonna keep this system in the office where i look at stock charts, but have decided switch to Apple for the living room.

 

[turbines]

Mercy!
I just purchased a new P5K Premium motherboard and 4 WD Raptor 150GB hard drives. I will be running RAID 0 with Windows32 XP Pro SP2 . I guess I should have done more homework. I see this same problem popping up on other forums. I tried researching this on the ASUS site but can't seem to access it; their server is slow as molasses. Is there any fix in sight? Do I need to look for another board and if so what would be recommended?

 

[jdkick]

Hmm. And I was just starting to plan a new build around an ASUS P5K-E WiFi (also P35 w/ ICH9R) with consideration for a RAID1 data volume. I'll be curious to see where this goes...

 

[Mr Fox]

Originally posted by: fpbear
I couldn't get my P5K Premium working with the onboard ICH9R RAID controller.

I discovered this is a large scale problem with these boards. In particular, if you have the Intel Q6600 and SATA II drives, the ICH9R RAID will crash Vista install.

Now the interesting question is - does anyone with this combination have ICH9R RAID working? If so what is your configuration? What is your secret?

Read the manual... if you cannot then get it worked out... call ASUS Tech Support.

1-812-282-2787


It is mostly operator issues when it comes to set-up

 

[Dewfuss]

I'm running a mirrored set of 250GB (SATA1) and a set of 500Gb (SATA2) drive on the same P5K board without issue. All 4 drives are Seagate 7200.9 or 10 drives. The only issue I had installing XP x86, Vista x86 and Vista x64 ( Yes, I'm tribooting currently) was when I lastly installed Vista x64 via CD. It would not recognize the RAID drives at all even to get to the place to F6 it to give it the ICH9R drivers until I unplugged the 500GB Mirror (home to XP x86 and Vista X86) and installed Vista x64 on the nonRAID single 250GB drive.
Once I gave it the ICH9R floppy during setup.. and then installed Asus chipset drivers and Intel Matrix Storage Console prior to plugging in the 500GB mirror back in and converting the Vista x64 to RAID via Intel Matrix storage manager.

P.S. Since the x64 install didn't know about the other 2 OSes I didn't have them as an option at bootup until using VistaBootPro to update the boot option.

So if you're building an OS from scratch with the OS bootable CD on this board... I reccomend not bothering to set up a 0/1 RAID until after the OS is installed. Just install it on a nonRAID drive on the RAID configured (within BIOS) ICH9R controller. Then use the Intel Matrix Storage Manager to configure the RAID of your choice once all drivers were installed.

Note: The XP install was installed prior to this motherboard but it transistioned well to the P5K. The old board had the ICH8R controller which allowed the new ICH9R controller to see it without issue upon installation. Vista x86 was installed via GUI from the XP desktop. The RAID was not an issue when installing the Vista x86 from XP, though I did give it the ICH9R drivers during the install prior to the 1st reboot.