How to disable Gigabyte RAID on EX58-UD5?

[tbrummel]

I have some SATA drives I want to hook up to the Gigabyte SATA ports on my EX58-UD5 mobo but I do not want any RAID.

What I want to do is simply disable RAID and use the drives as independent drives that I could move to another system w/o incident. However, when I go into the SmartBackup option in BIOS it only gives me options for which RAID type I want -- and I don't want any.

So, I thought I'd try JBOD - Just Buch Of Disks - but it appears Gigabyte's implementation of this is to make all the drives (on a controller at least) appear as one big disk. I don't want that.

So, I tried "Normal" which sounds like "off" but then I noticed that only one of my two drives shows up in the list of recognized drives in the standard BIOS settings screen that lists all the drives. This leads me to believe the RAID controller is doing 'something'...

Any help/insights would be appreciated.

[tbrummel]

Re: How to disable Gigabyte RAID on EX58-UD5?

I was hoping this was a simple question but no replies....

Anyone know if I'm trying to do something that isn't supported here?

What I did for now was just hook one drive to each "pair" and set the RAID mode to "Normal". That way I do see each drive in the BIOS and Windows and all is well. I know, however, that if I add a drive to either channel, it will not show up in the BIOS - which seems wrong to me. Can anyone confirm or deny that's how things should work? (In other words, if I put both drives on the same channel, only one shows up in the BIOS)

The Intel RAID controller is a snap. It's very clear which drives are in RAID and which are not and I can add/remove drives without issue.

[mv2devnull]

Re: How to disable Gigabyte RAID on EX58-UD5?

Specs say that EX58-UD5 has two JMB322: JMicron/Products

JMB322 seems to be a port-multiply & RAID chip. So, I guess it is a "SATA device" that is plugged into some "SATA controller". GSATA?

Even before, when the "RAID chip" were not Jmicron, their management via BIOS was limited, and just as limited with Windows applications. And if the connections are as I think, both the "SATA controller" and the JMB322 have to support the port multiplying to the extent that the SATA controller sees both drives.

Thus, even if you manage to manage the JMB322, that might not be enough. But focus your search on the JMB322 first.

[flyfisher]

Re: How to disable Gigabyte RAID on EX58-UD5?

I'm looking at the virtual BIOS for the UD5 here GA-EX58-UD5, and my UD3R has the same option. Look under integrated peripherals. Near the bottom of the BIOS page is a selection for Onboard SATA/IDE Device. the options for it are IDE, AHCI, or RAID/IDE. You can run your SATA drives in either IDE or AHCI mode. IDE will not require a driver, it will use a Windows IDE driver. If you want AHCI you will need the Jmicron driver http://tinyurl.com/ycgfgfu

Edit: I assumed you are using XP 32-bit. The jmicron is a 32 bit driver, you can also get the 64 bit on their website.

[tbrummel]

Re: How to disable Gigabyte RAID on EX58-UD5?

Thanks for the replies.

This board has IDE and AHCI as the Onboard SATA contoroller modes and I've got that set that to IDE. I don't think I've got any issues with that setting -- it's the next one that bothers me.

Once you enable the onboard SATA chip and set it to IDE mode, then you have to go to SmartBackup and you can see that it is treating those drives in some RAID mode. This is what my first post was describing.

According to the manual, using the Standard mode allows it to work as a port muiltiplier and you can (supposedly) just hook up 4 SATA drives and run them independently. However, what concerns me is that if I do put two drives on the same JMB322 chip (the same Gigabyte channel - since the Giabyte controller uses two JMB322 chips internally) then I only see one drive show up in the standard BIOS setting page that (Normally) shows all the SATA drives detected. Maybe it's ok in this case that the drive does not show up in the BIOS. I installed the Gigabyte RAID controller for Winodws 7 x64 -- which is the JMicron driver. I'll try to hook up a third drive now just to see what happens. It might be detected in Windows but not by the BIOS...

[flyfisher]

Re: How to disable Gigabyte RAID on EX58-UD5?

My apologies, I when I read the OP I did not realize the problem was with Smartbackup, with which I have no experience. Must have tired from doing 20" of snow today. You could also try AHCI since the driver is installed. Hope you get it worked out.