GA-EP45-DS4P AHCI controller won't properly raid my new WD RED 3TB HDDs

[AVJunkie]

I'm hoping someone can help cause I've been trying to solve this for a few days now and my head is spinning.

I bought 3 x 3TB WD RED drives to put in a RAID 5 array on my GA-EP45-DS4P mobo and when I CTRL-I to setup the raid, the intel raid controller sees them as 745GB and if I ignore this and continue anyway, it tells me the raid 5 drive capacity will be 1490GB. I have not continued past this point in case it somehow damages the drives. I have flashed to the latest F9b but this did not update the AHCI firmware. It's still 1.07. I have Intel RST 11.​2.​0.​1006 driver installed which I believe is the latest.

Windows 7 sees the disks properly but if I'm not mistaken the best way to setup a raid array is directly through the raid chip.

Is there anything I can do to get this raid array to work other than buy a new mobo??

Any help is appreciated.

Cheers

[Conners]

You might contact gigabyte support to see if your set up supports drives larger than 1 TB. I bet it doesn't. Or try through IRST ( Intel Rapid Storage Technology) in windows.

[flyfisher]

Not sure, but don't you need UEFI BIOS to support drives greater than 2.2 TB?

[profJim]

+1^^
I think that your motherboard and bios must provide GPT support for drives larger than 2TB.
I don't know if there are add-in raid controller cards that will let you use 3TB drives with older motherboards that don't support GPT partitioning.
A web search using mbr vs gpt should provide more information.

Both of my five year old win7 x64 systems support 2TB hard drives without any issues or problems.

[Hyper530]

You need UEFI BIOS for 2.2TB or grater hdd, but i don't think so Gigabyte will make UEFI BIOS for such old mobo.