Exposing SATA drives on a RAID controler in Windows

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caboosemoose

Gawd
Joined
Aug 26, 2002
Messages
584
OK, so I'm trying to get a coule of new SATA hard disks to show up in windows. Here's the rig:

Intel 975 XBX Bad Axe 1
Core 2
2GB
8800 GTX

So, I already have the standard four SATA ports occupied, so I have plugged an additional two disks into the Silicon Image RAID controller SATA ports. I can enter the RAID bios on boot and see that the drives are being detected correctly by the controller.

I have installed the silicon image driver from the Intel website and the controller shows up as "Silicon Image SiL 3114 SoftRAID Controller" in device manager.

What I want to do is run the drives a standard stand alone SATA disks, I don't to run any kind of RAID array but I can't see how to do this. There apears to be no option for this in the Silicon image BIOS. So what is the solution - do I need to change something in the main bios etc?

Thanks
 
Are they not showing up under "My Computer" or not showing up in disk manager?

Also, is the RAID controller set to plain IDE mode in the motherboard BIOS?
 
The drives are not showing up in explorer or device manager. I have looked in the main bios but cannot see any obvious options for the silicon image RAID controller.

In the BIOS for the controller itself I cant see any options for changing mode...
 
Chnaces are you are going to have to either use them in a Raid 0 array or see if there is a pass through option. Not sure if there are any other ways around it, but if they are showing up in your disk managment all you need to do is intialize them and format them and you are good to go.
 
I can find an option in the main BIOS drive configuration for the SATA controller mode and it is set to IDE, it appears to apply to the Intel controller, not the secondary silicon image controller. Surely you don't have to run the frigging drives in an array!
 
caboosemoose said:
The drives are not showing up in explorer or device manager. I have looked in the main bios but cannot see any obvious options for the silicon image RAID controller.

In the BIOS for the controller itself I cant see any options for changing mode...
Click to expand...

Check to see if they are listed in disk manager. Right click on My Computer and pick manage, then select the disk manager. They would show up as un-initialized disks.
 
They're not in disk manager.

During boot, the SiL RAID controller lists the two drives but also flashes up an error message saying missing devices or something, I'll have a look again in a sec.
 
Are you doing anything special with the 6 drives? If not, it's well worth your time to sell them and invest in larger drives. It'll save you electricity, noise, heat and reduce the odds of drive failure.
 
Well, they're pretty big drives, it all adds up to about 2TB, so consolidating isn't really an options short of spending rely huge money.
 
Basically, I have a 10k raptor as my boot/OS/application drive and then a bunch of other mainly 400GB for video storage. Just bought a new pair of 400GB drives as was running out of spae but I appear to have torched the motherboard, which is really joyous.
 
OK, apologies for spamming away lke this.
The thing finally booted, for some reason the BIOS wanted to have a good long talk to itself, fuck knows what is going on. Anyway, I appear to have solved the problem. I dumped the smallest drive and am now running just one drive on the RAID controller as a single drive Concatenation. That's extremely ghey, but at least I have the bulk of my drives up and running I guess.
 
Personally, I'd build a NAS with older hardware and keep so many drives out of your main case. Slap it in a closet somewhere and put some good cooling on it.
 
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