ASUS A8V Motherboard question

[chameleon23]

ASUS representatives are incompetant. I called twice and each time I get a completely different answer.

ASUS A8V mother has 4 SATA ports - 2 regular, 2 Raid.

I'm using the 2 regular for drives C and D. I want to add a 3rd hard drive, can I just use one of those SATA_Raid ports with only one drive or do I need to setup Raid for it to recognize the drive.

Thank you.

 

[jfunk]

Yes, you can just plug on drive into your SATA ports. You do not HAVE to use RAID, it's just an option.

 

[chameleon23]

thank you sir!

 

[chameleon23]

hey I bought the drive and just connected it. BIOS recognizes it after I enabled the Promise Raid controller.

However, Windows does not recognize it and the drivers are missing for a Raid controller in Device Manager.

I checked ASUS website for this motherboard and I can't find anything particular to the Promise controller. How can I go about getting these drivers?

From a spec sheet I see that these are the controllers:

2 channels Serial ATA 150 via VT8237 south bridge with RAID 0,1 support
2 channels Serial ATA 150 via Promise PDC20378 RAID with RAID 0, 1, 0+1 support

 

[Blazer7]

There're 10 different A8V mobos out there. Half of them have 4 SATA ports while the rest only have 2. The vanilla version (A8V) has only 2 SATA ports. Are you referring to the A8V Deluxe maybe?

 

[chameleon23]

Yes thank you, you're right. This is an older computer of mine and I forgot it was the deluxe version of the motherboard.

So it's the A8V Deluxe and I do have 4 SATA ports. Now looking at the ASUS drivers there they only show a 64-bit version of the Promise RAID controller. Here it is: Promise 64_bit for 64-bit Driver 1.00.1.39.

Must I have Windows 64-bit or is there a 32-bit driver? Also I'm only planning to run this one HD on the Promise RAID controller. Still possible correct?

Thank you again.

 

[Blazer7]

The drivers you are looking for can be found under IDE not RAID.

http://support.asus.com/downlo...-us&model=A8V%20Deluxe