ASUS DriveXpert?

[kompulsive]

I have a P6T Deluxe and I recently noticed this piece of software was on the downloads page for my motherboard so I grabbed it. When I start it up, it says "No disks or RAID." I am using a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB hard-drive. Why isn't DriveXpert detecting it? Do I have the wrong hard-drive drivers or disk controller drivers? Does anyone have any experience with this software? What is the main purpose of it?

[DTN107]

Are you trying to setup a raid?

[epimetheus]

What port is your hard drive plugged into? The DriveXpert feature is only for the orange SATA ports. Basically DriveXpert allows you to easily setup a 2 drive RAID 0 or 1 array at the BIOS level. I have played arround with it on other Asus boards and I'm not real impressed with it. It does what is says it does, but the speeds are less than desirable, at least using the RAID 0 function. I have a P5E that has it. It seems the P6T uses a different controller however - SI 5732 on the P5E vs. Marvell 88SE6320 on the P6T. So the feature may be better on the P6T.

Long story short, I'm betting you have your hard drive plugged into one of the 6 red SATA ports that are supported by the ICH10R southbridge. In which case the DriveXpert software wouldn't show any drives attached.

[kompulsive]

You're right, I'm using one of the red connectors instead of an orange one. If I only have one hard-drive would hooking it up to the orange connector even make a difference?

[epimetheus]

I wouldn't. The red connectors supported by the ICH10R will be faster.

[nitrobass24]

Drive Xpert sucks. all it is a fancy name with *special* ports for R1 or R0. Its slower and i have never found it to be any better then straight up R1 or R0, and when it fucks up its a PITA to deal with.

[DTN107]

^
Really?

Man... I have a P5Q Pro and that makes me feel like I'm two sata ports short now.

I wanted to use the orange and white sata slots for raid-0 and use the regular 6 red ports for storage hard-drives.

But doing so would really be slower than the red sata slots in raid 1?

[epimetheus]

I can attest that a R0 array on the DriveXpert ports is much slower than a R0 array on the ICH10R ports.

I set up a 2 drive R0 array to use for testing Windows 7 and it had much lower HD Tune scores under the DriveXpert than it did under the ICH10R on my P5E.

[DTN107]

Anyway running those ports as regular non-raid ports?

[JRS]

I think they will be fine running as regular ports - I'm currently using a Velociraptor off a Drive Xpert port on a P5Q Deluxe and it performs fine and benchmarks like any other Velociraptor would as a single boot drive.

The few benchmarks I've seen with Drive Xpert ports seem to indicate a data transfer "ceiling" of somewhere around 150MB/s. This is similiar (but not as bad) to the results you get with a USB port (about a 40MB/s limit) or running running sata drives connected via a PCI card (about 100MB/s). I don't think access times are affected, nor would data transfer rates for non-Raid0 drives.

If you hooked up two drives, but ran them separately, I think the only speedbump you may hit would be if you were reading a bunch of data to/from both of those drives at the same time.

[nitrobass24]

use the Drive Xpert ports for your optical drives :D

[DTN107]

@JRS
I try plugging my hdds into the drive xpert ports but it just doesn't find them. Is there something I am missing bios?

@
nitrobass24
Not sure if that is possible. It seems to stress it alot in the booklet :(

[drgnfang]

On P5Q Pro you can use the first port for "normal" drive, second port is either RAID or no drive seen. Never tried optical drive on either one, but fairly sure the manual says HDD only. And RAID0 on them is slow. Also, you don't need the Windows software to use/setup, you can do it all through the Bios.

http://www.hardfolding.com/fhtag.php/mem/649494/11/3.png (http://www.hardfolding.com/fh_stats/?pz=102&tnum=33&id=649494)

[DTN107]

Do other board manufactures like MSI or Gigabyte boards have a similar raid ports setup like AsusXpert?

I don't want to bother with this gimmick in the future.

[JRS]

@JRS
I try plugging my hdds into the drive xpert ports but it just doesn't find them. Is there something I am missing bios?
...

My P5Q Deluxe has a bios setting - try that first. Also, try only one drive in the first (port 0?) to start.

Typically other motherboards use jmicron controllers that setup in a more traditional manner. I think Asus was trying to come up with a solution that was more noob friendly - setup within Windows and not have to use the bios, and maybe a solution that was cheaper too. I think the end result is "less" than offering an those 2 ports with silicon image or jmicron drivers.

Right now I would not recommend an Asus motherboard with ports using Drive Xpert if anyone really needed good Raid0 performance out of the non-Intel sata ports. If you only need it to rip media to, for example, it may be okay with that.

I am in the process of rearranging the drives on my P5Q Deluxe and hope to be able to run some tests comparing the ICH10R with Drive Xpert in Raid0 using a pair of seagate 500gb/32mb cache and a pair of seagate 7200.10 350gb/16mb cache - I'll run both pairs on both kinds of controllers and try to get those results into this thread soon.

I'll repeat what I posted earlier - I think the Raid0 performance hit on these drives is a data transfer ceiling which means faster drives in Raid0 will take a bigger hit than a pair of slower drives. We'll see if I can prove/disprove that.

drgnfang may be correct that the second port is only usable if using two drives in Raid 0 or 1. I'll try that out as well.

I can verify that having the Drive Xpert enable in the bios is probably not a good idea while installing Vista x64. I was re-installing Vista x64 last night on a pair of seagate 250gb drives using Intel Matrix Raid0 on a 60gb partition. The Vista installer did not "like" the partion and claimed it was not valid to be a system partition. I disable Drive Xpert in the Bios and then the Vista install was happy with my matrix raid partition. Through this process, the only drives connected were the two drives connected to the ich10r ports, no other drives were connected, not even to the Drive Xpert ports.

[drgnfang]

Just checked the manual, and it says that if it is in Normal Mode that it will recognize drives on sata port 0 (orange) and 1 (white). I was never able to get it to see a drive on port 1 in Normal mode (ended up going with slow SuperSpeed, 2x 500g 7200.10). It also states that it doesn't support ATAPI (cd, dvd, etc...) or hot-swapping.

[JRS]

I was able to get two drives recognized in normal mode, but to do it, I had to first set them up in the bios in fast mode (Raid0). Once in Windows, I installed the Asus Drive Xpert software. It allows you to change the mode from Raid0 to Raid1 or to Normal while in Windows. All that can be done in the bios too, but with the Windows app, I was able to change the drive mode to normal from Raid0 and both drives were recognized as regular, separate drives within Windows (not possible with the bios as only 1 drive would be seen). The really freaky part is once I changed it to normal mode, I could see the data that had been on one of the drives prior to putting it in Drive Xpert and formatting that Raid0 partion in Windows! If I hadn't seen it, I would not have believed it. Very freaky.

I could never see drive(s) plugged into either Drive Xpert port while Drive Xpert was disabled in the Bios - which I expected.

Drive Xpert Tests:

1) A pair of Seagate 250gb 7200.10 7200rpm 16mb drives:
- Min 96
- Max 122 MB/s
- AVg 114 MB/s
- Access Time 15.5 ms
- Burst 91.6 MB/s
- cpu usage 3.9%

2) A pair of Seagate 500gb 7200.11 7200rpm 32mb drives
- Min 101
- Max 130 MB/s
- AVg 126 MB/s
- Access Time 13.0 ms
- Burst 96.2 MB/s
- cpu usage 2.7%

In short, yea, Drive Xpert Raid0 stinks. Its better than running Raid0 on a PCI card, but not by much.

I haven't yet been able to run a fair comparison with ICH10R yet, but those benchmarks are not hard to find. A good pair of 7200rpm drives like the 7200.11 above will get close to 200 MB/s, and average over 170 MB/s. I have a pair of 250gb Seagates in Raid0 short stroked to 60gb that Avg 135 MB/s, which I believe is typical of those drives in Intel Raid.

A motherboard with Asus Drive Xpert is not a good way to go if you expect to run Raid0 off those ports.

I'm bummed - I would really like to be able to run 6 sata hard drives in multiple Raid setups for OS and for running virtual machines (which I backup often so I like good transfer rates) and have a sata port open to eventually stick a Blu-Ray optical drive in.

I've tried a jmicron (Rosewill RC-216) pci-e sata card, but when it is physically installed it prevents the Intel raid drives from loading. Anybody out there can recommend a 2 port pci-e sata card that works alongside Intel Raid?

[JRS]

More tests... I installed the Rosewill PCIe card RC-216 (from here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132014&Tpk=rc-216 which is $20/w free shipping right now)

For all you P5Q Deluxe (and maybe an P5Q Series) to get this card to work, I had to disable "Marvell IDE Boot ROM" under Advanced, Onboard Devices Configuration. Otherwise its mere presence would prevent the intel drives from loading.

Configured 2 Seagate 7200.10 250gb on RC-216 as raid0
- Min 108
- Max 135 MB/s
- AVg 131 MB/s
- Access Time 15.7 ms
- Burst 112.6 MB/s
- cpu usage 4.2%

Configured 2 xSeagate 7200.11 500gb on RC-216 as raid0
- Min 103
- Max 147 MB/s
- AVg 140 MB/s
- Access Time 12.9 ms
- Burst 83.5 MB/s
- cpu usage 3.8%

Both beat Asus Drive Xpert and the test with the 500gb drives indicate that this card has about a 150MB/s ceiling, yet it still is a better performer, especially for a mere $20.

Anyone know of a good 2 port PCIe card that will give Raid0 performance on par with Intel ICH10R?

ASUS - I want a refund on my Drive Xpert!!!

[DTN107]

Wow. A part of me now wish I never bought the P5Q Pro and should have gone with gigabyte.

[azides]

... looking around for some data on 7200.12 and on the DriveExpert (I will use that for back ups). Little concerned about Seagate's disks so I might go WD 640GB Black AALS.

Have 2xST3320613AS, 7200.11, 320GB, in Raid 0 on ICH10R P5Q Deluxe, using latest Matrix drivers.

HD Tune 2.55

min - 109.7
max - 238.7
ave - 185.2
access - 17.5
burst - 1642.6
CPU - 8.7%

[JRS]

azides - you may want to seriously consider getting the WD 640GB AALS TODAY!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319

For backups, Drive Xpert is probably "good enough".

I've got a RocketRaid PCIe x4 4 port card coming so I'll be able to compare it against ICH10R.

[azides]

JRS, I think you are right! It's ok people showing these low level benchmarks, but I have seen a lot of data on the Seagate's compared to the WD's. It seems that while the Seagate's do better with sequential benchmarks, the WD's do better in real world transfers. Would that be down to access time?

What I will likely do is wait for WD to release a 1 platter 500GB black disk and get that.