• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Asus P5W DH Question

S

Some1ne

Senior member
So long story short, I'm planning on putting together a Conroe system (as soon as the chips actually become available), and would like to use the Asus P5W-DH for it, but I have kind of a stupid question...newegg lists the specs as 6x Internal SATA ports, and 1x e-SATA port, but on the picture of the board, I can only see 5 internal ports. Is the sixth one hiding somewhere, or is the newegg spec incorrect?

I need all 6, as I intend to run 4 drives in RAID-5 for my storage volume, and then two more in RAID-0 for my OS and program install volume, so 5 ports just won't cut it. Can anyone who has this board confirm that it really does support 6 internal SATA devices?
 
Wow, thanks...that's a really odd spot for it, no? I think I'm going to download their manual and see if there's anything funny going on...no point in purchasing 6 disks to use with a mainboard that can't run them in the configuration I want, or vice versa.
 
Okay, having reviewed the manual, the way I think it works is:

Intel's ICH7R provides 4 SATA ports/channels. Three of these are implemented as standard SATA connectors, while the fourth channel instead has the SiL RAID controller on it. The SiL RAID controller is used to implement what ASUS is terming "Ez-RAID", and it splits its channel from the ICH7R into two physical SATA connectors. This means that two devices can be connected, but the OS will see them as a single SATA device occupying a single channel thanks to the SiL controller that's sitting there, which means that you can install onto a RAID volume without any special driver disk (hence, "Ez-RAID"). While I like this concept (though I have concerns about bottlenecking issues, with two drives having their traffic routed through what boils down to a single SATA channel...and I'm not sure how these ports can be claimed to be "SATA 3.0 Gbps", given that each one splits a single SATA 3.0 Gbps interface), it's damn near fatal to my proposed build. Lastly, that one out of place SATA connector is provided by the Jmicron controller, which also provides the single e-SATA port, and which is capable if implementing a RAID-0 or 1 array across the e-SATA port and the internal port. Also, because the SiL controller is hanging off the ICH7R, the former can be used to implement a 4 disk RAID by spanning to a single disk on the SiL controller. No word if it can span to two disks on the SiL controller, but it's implied that it cannot.

So...what this would seem to mean is that a 4-disk RAID-5 plus a two disk RAID-0 is not possible with this board, unless I place the RAID-0 on the Jmicron controller, and to do that, one of the HDD's would have to support e-SATA (or is e-SATA backwards compatible with plain SATA?). Kind of lame really, as I thought this was supposed to be an "enthusiast" board, and that Ez-RAID thing is much less useful to me than a sixth, non-screwy SATA port would be (I mean, who the hell decided "well, we'll give them 3 ports on one controller, then we'll split the 4th port to implement another controller and hang two ports off of that, and then we'll integrate another controller that provides 2 additional ports, but we'll force one of those to be e-SATA", especially when the predecessor board (the P5WD2) ships with a sane SATA port configuration?). I guess that leaves my options as:

1. Implement a 3-disk RAID-5, with slightly larger disks, and stick the RAID-0 on the Ez-RAID, since I was going to put my OS on that anyways. I do like the idea of being able to install my OS without having to muck with a driver disk, but I don't like the idea of now having 33% of my HDD space being wasted in the RAID instead of just 25%, nor the fact that I'd have to get less cost-effective 400 GB disks in order to hit my storage target as a result, or the potential of performance bottlenecking since the RAID-0 drives would be sharing a single SATA channel.

2. Implement the 4-disk RAID-5, and scrap the RAID-0 and just use a single HDD for the OS and program drive. Also nice in that I'd no longer have to mess with a driver disk to install the OS, but it's kind of detrimental to the purpose of building an insanely fast PC. If I wanted something to not be as fast as possible, I'd just keep using my current desktop.

3. Pick a different mainboard...this seems like the most reasonable thing, although I really like the P5W-DH's built in wireless and remote control features (and really everything but the fact that that they screwed over the RAID controllers). Especially since they come at only a $40 premium over the P5WD2, so I guess either I'll have to switch to that board (though I've heard that in that case, I'd have to be very careful about board revision), or see what offerings are around from other manufacturers.


Sigh...Asus broke my build.
 
According to the manual, RAID-10 is accomplished using the spanning feature, meaning you put 3 drives on the ICH7R, and one on the SiL, to implement a RAID-10. This is the only config that seems to work for that RAID level, and it seems to mean that you cannot use the second SiL port for another disk, which may or may not be an issue depending upon if you have any SATA optical drives, or if you wanted to run any disks outside of the RAID.

For what it's worth, I think I'm just going to do the P5B, as it still has the built-in wireless, at least. I know it got a rather scathing review in the anandtech conroe article, but I think BIOS updates should fix most of the problems noted, and that review just seemed to be a bit over-critical of the board to me, since a Core 2 Duo at 3.7 GHz is nothing to sneeze at.
 
well, i'm watercooling and really want the best OCing board, so i will prolly still get the p5w dh. I found it for $230 so it's still an option.

I probabably wont be running any sata optical drives because i'm not spending $100 on a dvd burner when i can get one for $35



Edit: thanks for the heads up on all the raid stuff. Does the same apply for a raid 5 setup with 4 drives??
 
Good question, the manual is kind of ambiguous about that...it implies you can make a RAID-5 array using 4 disks the same way, however the configuration section *only* describes setting up a RAID-10 using 4 disks, so it never explicitly states that you can do the RAID-5 like that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top