The 680i & RAID Poll

[macrospect]

Basically I am wondering roughly how many of you have experienced any problem with the 680i chipset and RAID array's. Since this board can very well be my next purchase, and I will be running a RAID array on it, I wanted to get a good idea how widespread the current RAID problems are with the 680i.

If your RAID was not operating properly when you first bought but is now, then please comment.

 

[jdk]

No problems whatsoever on my EVGA 680i, running RAID1.

 

[R1ckCa1n]

No RAID but major issues with a Maxtor Diamond Max SATA drive. To the point where I just stopped trying and bought another hard drive.

 

[macrospect]

How is the new drive working out for you?

 

[Dan_D]

No RAID but major issues with a Maxtor Diamond Max SATA drive. To the point where I just stopped trying and bought another hard drive.

I have problems with a RAID 1 setup. I am using Maxtor Diamond Max 10 300GB drives.

 

[darkjedi]

The only issue I has for my RAID zero was that I had to use SATA ports 1 & 2 (The side mounted ones) before i could use any of the others.

So, I have my Raptors in RAID 0 on SATA 1 & 2 and a separate WD80GB "scratch" drive on SATA 4.

I use the EVGA 680i board.

 

[an4rk1]

2x 74Gb Raptor Raid 0 (array 1, sata 1 and 2)
2x 250Gb Maxtor Diamond Max Raid 0 (array 2, sata 3 and 4)

No problems at all once I used nlite to create a windows disk with the raid drivers included.

 

[PredatorJ]

2x 74gb Raptors RAID 0 On sata 1 and 2.

Same as an4rk1 , No problems at all. I also used the nlite method to install raid drivers.

 

[vanilla_guerilla]

2xraptor raid0 on ports 0 and 1
2x300gb maxline 3 raid0 on ports 2 and 3


no probs ever. no probs when i overclock over 3600, either. fantastic mainboard.
i use the included floppy and f6 to install drivers. i have done 2 clean installs, both no prob.

 

[drpeppir]

With all these nomadic motherboard decsions lately and the reformatting that involves just get a HDD controller, i got promise supertrack 8350 for 380 at the egg and go from mainboard to mainboard and no issues with new raid setups or the the reformatting and repartioning that involves.

 

[Benefit14snake]

I have problems left and right. Only when putting hardrives on any kind of load. When playing fear or EQ2 / using limewire i get RAID ACCESS FAILED! also sisandra cant bench my drives cause of failure. PISSING me off, so many problems.

 

[macrospect]

Seems to be hit or miss at this point!

I found this little tidbit interesting over at evga's forums:

[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica]I just finished my build tonight. I emailed Jacob with my findings as I communicated my thoughts earlier as to what may be causing the Raid problem.
I did not do any overclocking as I wanted to see what was going to happen so here goes.
I used 4-250GB WD drives in a Raid5 Configuration and 2-500GB seagate drives in a raid0 configuration on ports4&5.
What happened is that the Raid0 wanted to be the lead array and the Raid5 array the lag array. This is not the way I set this up so I loaded Windows XP X64 and used the Radi5 aray as the boot array. After the opsys was loaded I then set the other array as the storage array.
Here is what I know as a system builder for 14 yrs. When you use a raid array with 6 ports and only use 2 or 3 drives and then use a single drive non raid this tends to make the single drive want to be the boot drive even though you have the raid array as the boot drive.
This holds true especially with Intel boards so by using all 6 ports and setting 2 arrays you can make it work at standard settings.
I will try the overclock when I get my pc6400 ram and tweek the system to see what happens.
I mentioned to Jacob that this can be cured with an nVidia chipset update and a bios update. He has been great trying his hardest to track a solution to this problem so everyone sit tight .
For those thinking about getting this board download the Bios update in DOS and update it before you do anything else in BIOS so a bios reset is not needed.
My system is a follows
X-finity 600 watt PS SLI ready Dual Rail
E6600 2.4GHz stock cpu fan for now
4-Buffalo PC5400c mem for the time being total 4 gigs
2- 7600GS EVGA SLI video cards
4-250 WD Drives
2-500 Seagate drives
2- Dual Layered burners
Using onboard audio for now.
XP X64 OS
AND a dead Chicken hanging over the can just in case!!!!!!

That came from this 8 page thread: http://www.evga.com/community/messageboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=21626&whichpage=8
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[kleox64]

I gave up, nero was giving me issues when using any sort of RAID on the 680i chipset. I switched the to Silicon Image with no issues what so ever, its more mature, stable and robust. Ive routed the esata connections internaly using eSATA to SATA cables by the way.