Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 RAID/SATA controller questions?

Feek

Feek

Feek

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I've got a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard and currently I have a pair of Samsung HD501LJ 500Gb drives.

One is the boot device and has my Vista x64 build on it, and the other is storage of streaming media, etc etc.

I've got a nice fast Seagate ST3500320AS drive which will be here tomorrow and I plan ghosting my boot drive onto it and then setting the two Samsungs up as RAID 0.

Once I've created the RAID in the bios, do I need to load any drivers for it, or is it totally transparent to the OS? I think that because it's not the boot device that the OS should just see it as a single partition and let me use it, am I right in that?

Also, I see the motherboard has six SATA connectors.

The manual describes them as follows:

ICH8 Southbridge
  • 1 FDD connector, allowing connection of 1 FDD device
  • 4 SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATAII0,1,2,3), allowing connection of 4 SATA 3Gb/s devices

Onboard GIGABYTE SATA2 chip
  • 1 IDE connector (UDMA 33/ATA 66/ATA 100/ATA 133) allowing connection of 2 IDE devices
  • 2 SATA 3Gb/s connectors (GSAII0,1) allowing connection of 2 SATA 3Gb/s devices
  • Supports RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD for Serial ATA

At the moment I've got the two hard drives plugged into the first two connectors of the Intel ICH8 sockets and my DVD/CD drive plugged into the third connector.

I think that I need to enable the Gigabyte controller in the BIOS and configure it to the RAID/IDE setting and then connect the two Samsungs to the appropriate connectors. That leaves the four ICH8 connectors free, one for the new boot device and one for the optical drive, leaving two empty connectors.

Is that right?

Can I also have an external SATA drive connected into the third of the ICH8 sockets giving me a total of four hard drives (two of them as RAID0) and one optical device, leaving one free connector?
 
In theory, if you set the BIOS option to RAID, and create the RAID in the Gigabyte RAID menu that appears just after the POST screen, then all you'll need to do is install the Gigabyte RAID drivers once in Windows and then initialize the unformatted drive as normal..

And I don't see why you couldn't connect an external SATA drive to another of the SATA ports.
 
As some Gigabyte boards come with the back panel connectors to create an optional eSATA port or two, the answer to the second part is a definite 'yes'.
 
Feek said:
Unfortunately, ghosting isn't going as well as it could :(
Click to expand...

I did exactly as you just described quite recently. Ghosted my boot drive onto a new Hitachi drive and then formatted my two existing Samsungs as a RAID 0 array. (But this on my Quad Opteron). For ghosting I used the trial version of Acronis True Image - worked perfectly. If you're having trouble at this stage, you may want to try it
 
I have a similar board (DS3P), and I had loads of problems trying to install Vista on my Raid array when using the purple ports (Gigabyte ones). The purple ones need a driver for Vista to see the array, but even after installing the driver I had problems, sometimes Vista just would just hang during install.

I then created the array on the orange ports instead and it was fine. Also, no driver is needed for Vista to see the Raid array on these ports.
 
Tuvoc said:
I did exactly as you just described quite recently. Ghosted my boot drive onto a new Hitachi drive and then formatted my two existing Samsungs as a RAID 0 array. (But this on my Quad Opteron). For ghosting I used the trial version of Acronis True Image - worked perfectly. If you're having trouble at this stage, you may want to try it
Click to expand...

This has worked perfectly now - Acronis looks very good and did the job, ta.

Now the task of getting my data back onto the RAID and sorting out backups.
 
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