Hello

I recently purchased a 5th sata drive for my computer with the A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard.

The first 4 sata drives are connected to the nvidia controller as standard non-raid drives.

Now I would like to do the same thing for the 5th drive that I bought. So far I've seen that I can only enable or disable the SiI3114 raid controller though the bios (I read that there should be a SATA mode but that doesn't seem to be the case).

So basically I've had to enable the SiI3114 as a raid controller and have had to do a low level format and then set the drive up as a a JBOD (single). From my understanding of JBOD if I were to purchase a 6th sata drive at a later date it would add to the existing logical drive of the 5th drive. I'm also guessing by setting it up like this if i were to move this 5th drive to another computer without a raid controller it would not be able to see the data on it.

So my question is is it possible to set it up like my other 4 drives. I'd rather not have any raid and my searching through google has not turned up any results.

kanon-
Welcome to the board. Unfortunately the Sil port on the A8N SLI Deluxe is a RAID only controller. You'll have to use it in JBOD mode. I believe that only the A8N32 has the ability to enable the SIL as a SATA port. One thing you can do is purchase a SATA PCIe card and utilize one of your PCIe 4x or 1x ports. They run about $50 for a decent one. There are several folks here that run secondary controllers and if that is of interest you can post a thread asking for advice on what a good card would be.

I fought the on-board Sil Controller battle and despite claims by ASUS via several emails that it would do as you want, it will not. So about a year ago I gave in and bought a PCI based non-raid SATA controller card. (It does also use a Silicon Image chip I found out from the install CD.)

This SIIG brand card (purchased thru Newegg) supports four independent ports, but cards of that generation only support SATA I speeds. Try to get a SATA II speed card if you plan to use SATA II HDDs. I already had SATA II speed drives, so the card does slow them down in theory -- as photo storage for editing, I do not notice the lost speed.

I use three of the ports now, with the other port attached to a rear-panel external SATA adapter in case I need to add a drive quickly some day.

Thanks for the replies.

As it stands I am using it in JBOD mode. I was surprised to see though that when I swapped it with another drive and plugged it into the nvidia controller as a standard disk windows could still read it. As I probably won't need a 6th drive for a while I suppose I will leave it as it is.

In JOBD, the raid controller treats each disk as a separate physical storage platform, so you will still be able to see each one if you remove it and connect it to another computer. I used to swap my back up drive in and out of the case, depending on what I needed to back up using JBOD and never had any problems.