Confused about where to connect eSATA

[randers4]

I will soon be building new system using GA-EP45-DQ6. I will be setting up a 3-Disk RAID 5 on the ICH10R and also want to use 1 additional non-RAID internal SATA II drive and 2 external SATA II drives.

I've looked through the manual trying to figure out how to do this and still have the following questions:

1. Once you set SATA/ACHI Mode to RAID, do all drives plugged into the yellow SATA ports 0-5 have to be members of the RAID, or can you add additional SATA drive(s) on these ports that aren't part of the RAID?

2. What BIOS settings are required to run external SATA and what ports do you connect to? Do you connect to the GS0-3 (purple) ports, or are these reserved for Smart Backup only? Do you need to set them to AHCI?

3. Can I add the additional non-RAID drive to one of the GS0-3 ports and still us the others to run external SATA? If not, is there anywhere else to connect this drive and still maintain the RAID and eSATA functionality?

Thanks in advance for you help!
Bob

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Confused about where to connect eSATA

No, only the drives you create a array with in the RAID manager BIOS will be part of the RAID array. The others will be controlled by the RAID Bios, but they will not be part of the RAID, so yes you can add as many as you have room for.

Yes, purple ports are smart backup only, unless you flash back to a very old BIOS

You will have to use your eSATA drives on the yellow controllers, as the purple ports are for smart backup only

[mv2devnull]

Re: Confused about where to connect eSATA

For example, I do have GA-EP45-DQ6, and I have:
- yellow 0 and 1 as RAID1
- yellow 2 and 3 as another RAID1
- yellow 4 and 5 used by the eSATA bracket

It has been a real breeze to just plug an odd drive to the external port and use it. (Backup and restore operations for other machines/remains of machines).

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Confused about where to connect eSATA

Here is some more info and testing of these ports done by members here >>>

http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/ep45-ds5-dq6-27384/

http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/ga-ep45-ds5-config-advise-please-27638/

http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/10-hard-drives-ep45-ds5-27535/

http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/raid1-migration-ep45-dq6-5723-a-27308/

[randers4]

Re: Confused about where to connect eSATA

Thanks for the quick response. Good to hear that this board seems to be very flexible about use of SATA ports. That is not the case with the ASUS board I'm using now.

I haven't read through the posts in the links yet, but one followup question: Do you have to set any BIOS settings in order to successfully use eSATA, or can you just set the yellow ports to RAID and eSATA will still work off these ports (even though they are non-RAID)?

Bob

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Confused about where to connect eSATA

Yeap, they will be controlled by the RAID BIOS but will be NON RAID and will show up as such in the post.