Sata controllers and JBOD

wichall

wichall

wichall

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Sata controllers and JBOD.

Hi all, I currently have a Asus A8n SLI-Premium.

All 4 of the standard SATA ports filled, if i buy more hard drives can I only run them in RAID on the silicon image controller or does the silicon image controller allow you to run them as "normal" hard disks, I don't want to run RAID and I've also heard that if controllers offer JBOD they can lock that hard drive to only that controller is this true?

Also, if I can't do this on the Silicon RAID ports will I be able to acheive this on one of those adaptec controllers on ocuk?

Thanks
 
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Silicon controllers are generally quite good and I would have thought they would let you use JBOD, I have never heard of controllers "locking" hdd's to certain controllers and if they did I doubt a silicon controller would. Also those adaptec controllers are quite expensive, if you just want JBOD I would buy the cheapest card you can get.

XFX offer one "XFX REVO 64 SPU 3 Port SATA Raid Card" which from a review doesn't even require drivers! I have seen this card for £11.74 on a "today only" special, I think I might order one :) The review did mention it uses a ATA100 -> sata bridge so if you wanted to RAID 0 it wouldn't be worth it but for general storage it would be fine :)
 
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What it means is that if you get a new mobo with a different RAID controller you can't access the files on the drives and you will need to setup RAID again

Why not just connect the drives as separate drives instead of JBOD?
 
Right both new drives are connected to the Sil Image controller, if I enable it in bios i get the silicon image bios come up with only the options to make jbod and raid, if i leave the drives as they are and try to boot it will just hang on POST after the sil image bios.
 
Someone must have some ideas, all I want is to be able to add these 2 500GB drives as "normal" drives to my system, either using the Silicon controller or something else, the XFX ones look good but can I use these for non-RAID drives?

(I need to move drives between controllers which is why I don't want RAID or JBOD)
 
Thanks for the reply, after some searching it turns out ASUS disabled the SATA mode option somewhere along the way which is just great...

I'll have a look in that review now and then find somewhere to buy it, OCUK's stock is surprisingly small on SATA controllers.

Also, is there any performance loss using PCI for a SATA controller? If so does PCI-Express have a performance loss too?
 
i have the same mobo and i had the same problem a few months back. I know for sure u can run one drive in non-raid on the sil image raid controller because i have one attached now. I think u can just select single disk. Then i have another 2 drives in raid 1 on the controller too. The controller will only let me create one array of the same type though. So if u want to attach both drives to the controller just as normal drives without using raid then that isnt possible.
 
The XFX card doesn't seem to be non-RAID compliant, it's so annoying that the lacie card is out of stock with no ETA, that would be perfect, I'll just use JBOD for now i suppose, and when I start moving the drives back and forth I'll just have to have another look for a non-RAID controller.
 
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