GA-EP45-DS5 G-SATA Problem! Please Help!

[albarth]

Hi Janus,
what about the DVD? Can´t I use it in the GSATA at all? What about 4 disks? This is also not working...
Thanks, Al

[albarth]

Thanks Janus!
What about 4 discs? I can't get that running, too.
Also, DVD is still not working in any port, is that really by design?
Do you have some smart backup technical documentation?
Thanks, Al

[lmfs]

Same thing here regarding S-ATA DVD. No go when connecting to GS0/GS1/GS2/GS3 no matter what settings I use in the BIOS (tried all combinations) using the latest F8 BIOS from Gigabyte.

Too bad I got this board (EP45-DQ6) solely for those extra ports... Using RAID in the other 6 ports :(

[albarth]

Hi lmfs,
seems that this is a general problem, good to know my new board is not crashed...
Yes, I have chosen this board ONLY because of the 10 SATA ports. I only can use 8, and DVD must be on Intel. Very poor.
Bad to hear that F8 is not chaning this.
I still don't understand how to work with Smart Backup. Leave that by now.
The "by design" answer not nice...

Question about F8? What has changed?

Is G-BIOS and the RAID COntrol Mode for G-SATA available again with F8? I'm now back on F5 and running a standard mirror on G-SATA ports 0 and 2... Better than not using it at all.

Thanks, Al

[Xcrupules]

Hello All,

I have the same mobo and also problems with the Gigabyte's SATA controller. Without smartbackup, he also sees my two samsung 640GB F1 drives in the first two ports as one 1,2 TB disk. That was no problem for me as I assumed he made automatically a stripe raid, what I wanted.

Yesterday I upgraded my bios to F8 but after making changes in the bios for automatic power-on with keyboard the PC started rebooting all the time. Managed to get back to F7 but now he doesn't see my samsung disks anymore on the G-Sata controller???
The CD-ROM and the other HD on the IDE port are still visible. Hopefully my data isn't lost ...

Mailed technical support but no answer yet.

[lmfs]

Hi,

I also had some problems when upgrading to F8. I wasn't able to pass the "Initializing storage policy" that is run when you enable or change GS0-GS3 ports (which was done automatically after the F8 upgrade). I had to clear the BIOS, remove the battery, flash it a couple of times before it finally passed this stage. Not a big problem since I always build my systems on the desk, outside the casing, before going live with them. A bit annoying, but it worked finally.

Also, changing some values also affect other parts/pages in the setup. The most annoying is that if you change C1E and/or overclock, the CPU smart fan is disabled - effectively running the CPU fan at max speed at all times. You can "trick" the bios by manually enable "CPU Smart Fan" and then select PWM/Voltage. But... That is only in effect until you change some other setting and forget to enable PWM/Voltage.

But I can't understand why it isn't possible to use the GS0/GS2 ports for S-ATA DVDs? That was my immediate idea/reaction when I saw it had these four extra ports.

I hope the BIOS will improve, but until then - it will remain on my desk.

[mv2devnull]

AFAIK,

The "Gigabyte SATA2" -chip is a JMicron 363 set to provide an IDE channel, and couple SATA devices. Those "SATA devices" happen to be Silicon Image 5723 chips. A SiI 5723 provides minimal hardware RAID0/1 functionality, but probably at some cost. And that cost seems to be lack of support for ATAPI devices, such as CD/DVD.

Asus has P45 boards with SiI 5723 behind Marvell 6121 chip. (They have had JMicron 363 on their earlier boards.) And Asus documentation stresses that on their board the SiI 5723 does not support ATAPI.

Now that I think, I've never even looked at documentation of hardware RAID HBA's for whether they allow connection of non-HDD on them. But I do doubt that they would.

That leaves the IDE channel on 363, and the SATA ports on the ICH10R, both versatile enough to support ATAPI.

[lmfs]

Hmm... Actually, I looked at the Sil5723 (aka SteelVine) specifications before I went with this board and the product documentation says "Supports ATAPI & asynchronous notification" which I, incorrectly, interpreted as good to go with S-ATA connected ATAPI devices.

(See: Silicon Image - Product - SiI5723 Storage Processor)

Don't get me wrong, it's a really nice board and works great, but it would have been *really* nice to be able to use the "extra" ports for other things than just RAID. There are some rough edges still to be cleared out from the BIOS but I hope that will be fixed in upcoming releases.

[Xcrupules]

It seems that the BIOS version F8 is removed from the website ...
Still I didn't succeed in getting the SATA ports on the Gigabyte controller to work again. Hopefully the next BIOS version will bring some life in them.

[lmfs]

BIOS F10a tested (after F8 was removed) and the results are the same, no S-ATA for GS0-GS3.

Also, the "feature" that disables CPU fan control is still present (enabling a XMP DRAM profile disables "Smart Fan").

No differences spotted.

[EDIT]
Hmm... One strange difference though. Previously the sensors reported ~16.5W for the CPU (idle) now it's reporting ~11.5W in the same state, all BIOS settings equal between F8 and F10a. Which also means the CPU temperature is lower than before.