Help with Asus Maximus II Formula SATA weirdness

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prasvt

Gawd
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Dec 8, 2005
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557
Never a dull moment when I do a new build. So I've got 3 250gb sata disks connected to ports 1 (Seagate), 2 (Seagate), and 3 (WD) and 2 optical drives on ports 4 and 5. Port 6 is connected to the case's eSATA front panel port. And then I have a Seagate 500gb eSATA drive connected to the back.

So Vista was already installed (no drivers, just a fresh unactivated Vista x64 ultimate install) when I hooked up the machine. That's because it was after a fresh install that I realized my ip35 Pro had some issues (the dead pci slots).

So the problem is that the WD 250gb connected to port 3 has been disappearing once Vista boots. I changed up the SATA cable to a brand new one and the problem persisted. So I switched ports 2 and 3 and port 3 seemed to work with the Seagate 250gb while the WD drive again disappeared after a few minutes. I had to shut down and boot up again to get the drive to reappear.

After that, I took out the WD drive and hooked it up to the eSATA enclosure and put the 500gb in the case.

That was last night. As of this morning, the WD drive is still up and passed a WD extended diagnostics test.

On the flip side, the 500gb drive showed up as a raw unformatted drive once I took it out of the eSATA enclosure. Then I swapped SATA connectors so that the 500GB is connected to port 6 and port 5 is now connected to the front panel eSATA connector.

There was some encoded movies and my FarCry 2 save game (ugh..a couple of hours lost on that) so not too upset about that, but still confused since it was formatted NTFS. All the internal disks are set on AHCI mode, but I have no idea about the eSATA disks. The BIOS doesn't have an explicit AHCI/IDE option for eSATA like the iP35 Pro did so could that have caused the 500gb to show up as raw?

Also any idea why my WD drive was disappearing intermittently? I've got all my prog backups and about 100gb of music on there (all but 7gb backed up to dvds) but the disk appears to be ok now that it's in the enclosure.

Should I connect another drive to Port 3 and see if it acts up, just to see if the port is ok or not?

I d'loaded a Vista hotfix related to disappearing SATA drives...so I may try that when I get home from work.

Anyway, any insights into this whole thing would be appreciated!! Also, sorry for the wordy description...I'm just long winded like that!
 
Well apparently there is a compatibility issue between some WD SATA drives and the Maximus II Formula chipset. Anytime I use the drive as an eSATA drive it works fine but internally it'll disappear. Found a review that says at much:

http://www.pimp-my-rig.com/2008/10/review-wd-caviar-640gb-wd6400aaks-sata.html

Just an FYI.

Downside here is that the WD's temps push 58C in my iogear aluminum hdd enclosure (it has a thermal pad to transfer heat to the casing). So I guess I'll backup all the data to another disk and just monitor it for a while.
 
I upgraded my 680i system to this board last month and so far I have no issues. I strayed away though from the sata 1/2 ports as they are labeled "Speeding". Like you I installed it as an upgrade, OS was existing *Vista Ult. 32x.

I'm running several drives, CDROMS are on the IDE channel x2, and i have 5 drives, 2 160's, 2 500gb, and 1 tb.

I just used 3-6. Never had an issue.

Fast fwd to last week. My bro's pc just burnt out *abit awd9 max fried caps. He loves my build and the numbers its crunching on the e8400, so he said "just do the same to mine". He was running similar drive config, 1 cdrom on ide, 3 drives on sata.

He needed no data restored so with 2 120gb baracudas and 1 500gb wd i decided to go 1-2 with the 120gbs, and port 3 to the 500gb.

This thing runs like complete dog $h!I. I've been losing the WD's, vista load crashed x4, finally up and going after 5hrs and still random issues with the WD in the OS and the speeding feature on this board is a joke!

My pc is pulling 15k+ on 3d mark, happy as hell with how its chugging. maybe sata 1-2 is crap with the bios or something with the control freaking out when they are used. All I know is I will never hook a drive up to either port no matter how the BIOS is told to handle them.

Nate
 
Well, I've been using WD drives for years and never had a problem w/ any of my boards..esp the last 2 socket 775 boards - MSI 650sli board, and the Abit p35 board. One thing I did notice was that my AHCI drivers weren't installed in vista. I had installed the intel chipset drivers but not the intel matrix manager. Once I installed that, the SATA controller got updated in the device manager. By then though, I'd moved the WD drive to the external enclosure.

BTW, this drive is running really hot in the iogear aluminum enclosure ...58-60C idle! WTF? So now I have to decide whether I feel like swapping this drive with an internal drive for the umpteenth time to see if the SATA driver installation may fix the issue.

Frankly it's a pain in the ass. The WD drive works fine (aside from the heat) when it's connected to the rear eSATA port and has passed multiple disk diagnostics. So it's probably okay..

I have all the SATA ports used right now..2 other 250gbs, 2 500gbs, a bluray drive and a burner and none of them are having issues (all seagates except one 500gb) - and that 500gb WD has no problems. Completely bizarre.
 
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