CPDMF Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 I've got 4 Raptors myself, At least I can sell them for enough to buy new Hitachi's if that's what it takes to use my rig. My X1900 master showed up today and I ordered an XT last night so I really have no choice but to get a working crossfire setup going Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nemesis.ie Posted October 11, 2006 Posted October 11, 2006 Regarding the no errors with Hitachi drives: Assuming this is fully repeatable, it appears as follows: Raptors give problems Seagates give problems (well my 160GB 7200.9s do anyway). Some people had boards that worked with the above drives. Mine seems mostly stable with Win x64 and 16k stripe with 16k AU ("cluster") but I have still seen freezes at cold boot and also running "DOS" clone utilities. More voltage on the RAM seems to help for some reason too, even though apart from freezes I see no errors in StressPrime with the lower voltage ...... Maybe we should get a drive poll ..... but I do think a lot of this does point to BIOS issues and possibly sub-par batches of ULI chips. Maybe someone who is seeing a lot of errors all the time still can run some tests at different SB voltages and see if that makes any difference. (including the highest AND lowest possible). Food for thought I hope ..... then of course there is this co-existing RAID BIOS issue .... not response on that, it is a MAJOR and OBVIOUS flaw, it means the board does not meet the specs advertised (we expect two WORKING at the SAME TIME RAID controllers). Here we are months later and we can't use both arrays .... I would like a mirror on my SiI controller for backups ...... Later! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
SiLvABuLLetZ Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 You're lucky. I didn't use f6 drivers when I first got the motherboard and windows xp install froze so many times I couldn't install. I almost went insane until I realized that F6 drivers are a must. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPDMF Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 My board was dropped off after my post last night, no paperwork and it was the same board I sent out. Nothing had been changed. I still had both arrays set up from my friends board so I through the hitachis to it and no errors again. I threw the Raptors back in and I was able to get it to error on the second pass of HD Tune. I flashed back to the 4/25 bios and cleared the CMOS for a couple of hours while I watched a movie. Here's where it gets strange, I am now able to have both controllers on at the same time, I can get into both RAID ROM bioses and I can set up any array scheme I like, to make it even wierder I threw in an add in card and I can get to all three RAID ROM bioses.. I am going to do some more testing and see if TMOD and I can get together and disect the bioses. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nemesis.ie Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 Yes, I found the controllers worked better together with the older BIOS(es) too. Do you have both LAN controllers on as well out of interest? Good luck with the comparisons ..... and the other funny thing is the older BIOSes also have the older RAID BIOS from ULI .... so maybe the newer "so-called fixed" ones are a little larger and just don't fit. :confused: Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
SiLvABuLLetZ Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 My board was dropped off after my post last night, no paperwork and it was the same board I sent out. Nothing had been changed. I still had both arrays set up from my friends board so I through the hitachis to it and no errors again. I threw the Raptors back in and I was able to get it to error on the second pass of HD Tune. I flashed back to the 4/25 bios and cleared the CMOS for a couple of hours while I watched a movie. Here's where it gets strange, I am now able to have both controllers on at the same time, I can get into both RAID ROM bioses and I can set up any array scheme I like, to make it even wierder I threw in an add in card and I can get to all three RAID ROM bioses.. I am going to do some more testing and see if TMOD and I can get together and disect the bioses. That is interesting. 2 Things: You RMA'd their board and they didn't fix the freeze issue by replacing the board? Also, why the 4/25 bios? Lastly, are the disk errors less or non occuring with the older bios and sil/uli both enabled? ;D Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPDMF Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 With the 7/28 bios I get the option rom cannot invoke error and cannot get into any of the raid bioses without disabling one first. With the 4/25 bios I can get into 3 raid bioses without haiving to disable any. I can use both controllers plus an add-in card at the same time now. The only changes made were switching to 80gig Hitachi sataII drives and flashing back to the 4/25 bios. I have been beating the crap out of these drives and have yet to get any freezes and my event viewer is free from any error. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
SiLvABuLLetZ Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 With the 7/28 bios I get the option rom cannot invoke error and cannot get into any of the raid bioses without disabling one first. With the 4/25 bios I can get into 3 raid bioses without haiving to disable any. I can use both controllers plus an add-in card at the same time now. The only changes made were switching to 80gig Hitachi sataII drives and flashing back to the 4/25 bios. I have been beating the crap out of these drives and have yet to get any freezes and my event viewer is free from any error. But they're so slow! Are you going to play bf2 on them? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPDMF Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 Actually after some very thorough testing, the hitachi's in 2 X RAID0 are only 10MB/s slower than the Raptors and fall about 2ms behind in random access but make up for that by having burst speeds in 360 range. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nemesis.ie Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 The plot thickens ..... So, for fun, I flashed in 425 again .... I noticed the flash util reported a date of 7/28/2006 which I thought was curious but the files was def R5UD425.bin. Anyway, I have the SiI in SATA mode for now, and no ROM errors, will boot again shortly and see if I can see it in DOS again. The down-side so far (always is one eh?) is that Legacy USB KB support seems to have vanished and my ZBoard is not usable until Windows loads. :-( Thanks goodness for spare keyboards. Speed is not affected, not seen a lock yet, HDTach is reporting ungodly speed - Long test results from the 4 drives; Burst: 608.7MB, Avg. Read: 421MB/s, latency 7ms. I can compare against the previous BIOS as I think I forgot to test under the 64bit OS, so it could be that helping things along or the AU size now at 16K ..... Apart from the USB, if the SiI will enable properly now, I might be happy(ier). Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPDMF Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 I use a Z-board and it still works at bios and dos level. Something strange with each board having it's own set of rules.. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
SiLvABuLLetZ Posted October 12, 2006 Posted October 12, 2006 edit: I was mindless and anxious, I forgot to put the power cables in them. LOL Ok, I just tried putting in 2 more raptors to assist the other 2. Bios is not detecting them? They are plugged in to the board, but with the 26 AWG sata cables, not the 30 AWG yellow sata cables that came with the motherboard.. Could this be the reason? I hope! :/ Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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