GA-EP45-DS5 Problem with SATA DVD R/RW on Sil5723 controller

[RobGG]

I have 6 * HDD attached to the Southbridge controller (ICH10R) with 4 in a RAID 0 array and 2 non-RAID. I am running Vista with SP1.

I have been attempting to get 2 * SATA DVD R/RW drives working on the "Purple" connectors (Gigabyte SATA2 Sil5723) to no avail. I can temporarily connect an HDD to GS0 and it is recongnised, further HDD's connected to GS1, 2 or 3 are not recognised. The ports are enabled in the BIOS. If I replace the recognised HDD on GS0 with a SATA DVD drive the DVD drive is not recognised.

Some questions:
Are SATA DVD drives supported on the Sil5723 controller?
Is more than one single HDD supported on the Sil5723 controller?
Are there any additional drivers required to be loaded into Vista to enable use of the Sil5723 controller?
Any other clues to getting me going?

Regards, Robert

[mccann73]

It looks like there are issues with the controller supporting atapi devices, have a read on this thread

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

As for using sata devices on this controller, myself and other users have been having issues getting any kind of raid setup configured on the SATA2 after BIOS F5, it seems they disabled the RAID controller and only devices on GS0-GS2 can be used as normal sata drives.

Having a look at the website it seems they have quietly changed the official specs on the website to say it now only supports RAID 1, I am not sure if any other options will ever be enabled again?

GIGABYTE - Product - Motherboard - Specification - GA-EP45-DS5 (rev. 1.0)

cheers