sb600 raid and sata

Master_Pain

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 13, 2007
Messages
4,958
Anyone running an sb600 motherboard with hardrives in raid and then additionally running sata DVD Burners as well? When I try and play games off of my sata DVD, Kane's Wrath and Assasin's Creed give me emulation errors. When I plop the DVDs in into my IDE DVD burner, they load right up. I took a look in the device manager, and my sata DVD burner comes up as being a SCSI drive. I read on google that SecuRom doesn't like this setup, but didn't find much information on it. So, does anyone have a setup like mine and have the same issues, or a solution, or sata DVD burner that works in this setup?

I currently have a Samsung SH-S203N sata DVD burner

This thread is reference
 
Although I can't confirm with your motherboard, my Abit IP35 Pro is doing Raid1 on 2 x 160 drives and running my main 320GB and the same Samsung burner you have... just fine...

It does sound like your motherboard is trying to control all the devices like RAID when they're not...
 
Do you play any games that SecuRom protection? It runs just fine, but SecuRom is a bitch and won't let me play games with it.
 
Hi Master_Pain,
My setup looks a lot like yours (down to the same DVD burner). I don't play those games, but I haven't experenced any issues like you describe. I do know that there are many different versions of the ATI SB600 RAID driver out there. The only stable one on my board is the one I borrowed from DFI's site. Cooky.
 
Since SCSI was the virtual optical drive interface of choice, that's really not very suprising. Daemon tools, Alcohol etc all used a virtual SCSI drive, so the protection developers decided to blacklist all SCSI opticals. There are ways around the blacklisting, but if you have a PATA optical, it's probably best just to use that.

Just remember....They know best what's good for you...
 
Well, is there any way to make them turn up as sata instead of scsi?
 
Have you tried removing the PATA optical and just running the SATA optical?
 
I just talked to ATI and the guy told me that he had the same problem as well. He said it was not a southbridge problem, but was a Windows thing. He said to force a regular driver on it. So, anyone know a driver I can use to force back?
 
As previously hinted upon try removing the PATA optical. The last time I read about this issue at the DaemonTools forums it was mentioned that if you have both PATA and SCSI opticals on your system the copy protection assumes the SCSI drives are emulated.
 
As previously hinted upon try removing the PATA optical. The last time I read about this issue at the DaemonTools forums it was mentioned that if you have both PATA and SCSI opticals on your system the copy protection assumes the SCSI drives are emulated.

I unplugged the IDE drive, both power and IDE cable, and still no go. I also tried plugging in the SATA optical drive cable into the master side of the sata ports and the raid array into the data side, and that didn't work either.
 
Hmmm...somewhat radical of a solution but google yasu.

(hope this is allowed here)
 
yasu is a negative, don't want to be running extra bloatware, even if it is tiny.
 
Well, is there any way to make them turn up as sata instead of scsi?

bump, I really want to run sata optical drives.

Unfortunately, the way the SB600 is designed, you either have all four SATA ports with AHCI/RAID enabled -- or none at all. What's more, AMD/ATi (and most other chipset makers except Intel) treat their AHCI/RAID drivers as SCSI drivers, causing all of the drives connected to the SATA ports to be treated as SCSI devices. Therefore, you cannot force your SATA optical drive (or the SATA port that the SATA burner is connected to) to run in IDE compatibility mode with your dual SATA hard drives configured in any type of RAID configuration. Uninstalling the AHCI/RAID driver, in this case, won't work at all -- you'll have to wipe out your RAID array and simply run your SATA hard drives as two separate IDE-compatible volumes (with a fresh install of Windows on one of the drives) in order to force the SATA optical drive to run in IDE mode. Otherwise, the only way around this would be to get a PATA optical drive.
 
You can't do a driver update in device manager? That's what ATI tech support said to do, but I have no clue where to get the IDE driver.
 
You can't do a driver update in device manager?

All that does is to update to a newer version of the AHCI/RAID driver (which is still treated as a SCSI driver). As I said, if you try to force your SATA drive to operate in IDE mode by uninstalling the AHCI/RAID drivers, your RAID array (which I assume to be your Windows drive array) would be automatically "killed" (and thus you would have a "dead" system which requires a complete reformat of your hard drives and a fresh reinstall of Windows).

In other words, you cannot have an SATA RAID array and an IDE-compatible SATA optical drive in the same system with an SB600-based motherboard. This is because the SB600 has only a single SATA controller from which all four of its SATA ports is run off of, and installing AMD's AHCI/RAID driver would force all four SATA ports into AHCI-enabled mode with all four SATA drives being treated as SCSI devices.
 
Ok, so basically, I am SOL for doing it this way. I would assume the only other option I have would be to get a raid card or sata expansion card.
 
Ok, so basically, I am SOL for doing it this way. I would assume the only other option I have would be to get a raid card or sata expansion card.

That isn't as easy as it seems. The SATA expansion cards and RAID cards are still treated as SCSI controllers under Windows. This means that they're really suitable only for hard drives. (In other words, even if you do get such a card, you'll still need to kill your existing RAID array before you move your hard drive connections to the expansion card and then recreate a new RAID array and reformat and reinstall Windows since the existing RAID array only works on the current AMD/ATi chipset controller.)

Thus, you're basically SOL no matter what after you've created your existing RAID array to begin with. At this point you'll have to use a PATA (IDE) optical drive on your SB600-based system, and find or build another system in which you can use your SATA optical drive.
 
ok, guess I will stick to IDE then. You know of any good quiet IDE DVD burners?
 
Hmm...tried Bioshock on my comp (Plex 755SA SATA burner) with a LiteOn PATA DVD-ROM drive with the disk in the Plex (it shows up as a Scuzzy device in device manager) and it plays fine. This is on a Gigabyte 790 chipset board with a 600 sb also and no problems. If it is that big of a deal, there are other ways around the protection ya know...
 
no other ways around the protection for multiplayer games though. I usually crack all of my single player games so I don't have to deal with the CDs after the install. Plus, they don't get scratched up as fast when they don't have to be pulled out and inserted all the time. On a side note, my penis is scratched up pretty bad.... jk jk
 
Back
Top