help in setting up JBOD with 3TB driver in Asus p6t system

[CheeCha]

Hello friends, I desperately need your help. I need to set up my p6t system on an optimal path in order to work with a big stack of drives, where most of them will be possibly be increased or upgraded to 3TB or even more if need in future.

The only two criteria which are necessary to be taken under considered are getting those 3TB drives function smoothly now and then and also all the drives should be configured in a proper way.
My system OS details: OS - Win7 x64 Ultimate SP1, fully updated.

[sArkar]

Even I am in need to doing the same thing. Let me tell you that I am not really a regular user of RAID, in fact I do not really use RAID. Actually the machine which I am using is a household media server with at most 10 Hard disks in it. And currently most of them are I guess 10 1.5TB or 2TB and as mentioned in the above post even I need to maximize the size to at least 3TB or more than that. I am using a Hard disk Sentinel

• 2x 1.5TB seagates on ICH10 family 2 port sata storage controller
• 3x 1.5tb seagates on ICH10 family 4 port sata storage controller
• 1 sata optical drive on the 4port as well

Also I have a Rosewill RC-218 4 port sata expander card, which is currently having a 2TB WD drive and a 3TB Seagate on it.

[Cain]

For you kind information let me tell you that Intel ICH10R naturally supports drives that are over 2.2TB having Intel Rapid Storage Technology of version 10.1 or more than that, remember they are for multiple drives on RAID. So therefore you can use a single drives in SATA RAID mode. You could also use a GPD i.e. GUID Partition Table format for the drives that are greater than 2TB which is the extreme limit for MBR disks. For the further detailed knowledge just let me know what are the setting you have in your BIOS for the following things:

• Storage Configuration
• SATA Configuration
• Configure SATA as

[Quasim]

On your ICH10R better you use a Intel Rapid Storage Technology also make sure that you set the SATA configuration to RAID instead of IDE. For your boot drive if you are using a JMicron IDE Controller, you must disconnect all the SATA drives from the Intel ICH10R controller. You need not have to worry with the disconnection as you can later on add them back after you update the storage controller driver through Disk Manager.

For your knowledge, you can also update your drive using the Disk Manager. You know that the Intel Rapid Storage Technology F6 Driver Diskettes is only about .30 MB in size so therefore this reason you need to always uncompress the zip file once before you always use it. You can get the intel 5 series chipset downloaded from intel downloads. There’s no issue with the installation of the IRST software as this software can be installed later after you update the driver.

[CheeCha]

I already set RAID in the BIOS and then later on installed the drivers and the RST software which however worked well. Then I replugged my drives back again but then when I power on, the drives are unable to display in windows, not just that also the Device Manager shows that the it could not start up the ICH10R SATA Raid controller.

I am not sure but I think that the issue is with the BIOS, I mean that it could be due to the RAID mode set in for BIOS but then later on I realized that I actually do not have any RAID arrays that are set up, in fact I never had or used RAID. Next I guess I was supposed to configure it somehow as a bunch of single disks or something related to that. Till now I have changed the BIOS settings, instead of RAID I have set it to AHCI and then rebooted again. After this windows 7 automatically reinstalled all the old drivers.

[Geniee]

I already set RAID in the BIOS and then later on installed the drivers and the RST software which however worked well. Then I replugged my drives back again but then when I power on, the drives are unable to display in windows, not just that also the Device Manager Shows that the it could not start up the ICH10R SATA Raid controller.

I guess setting it to RAID in the BIOS and then installing the drives and RST software should definitely work out. Once you do this thing do make any other changes, just do as I say:

• Plug in one drive
• Go to Disk Manager
• Active the drive and then assign it a drive letter

Follow the same step for others too. Let me tell you that 3TB drives somehow require a GPT partition, other thing is that you can also format the drive in Disk Management if its empty. Also when you add a hard drives just check out the boot order in the BIOS, you may be needing which hard drive is actually the boot drive.The old MBR formats are now a days limited to 2TB.

[jamiejohn]

After you install windows with RAID disabled the applications will allow you to enable RAID on an Intel ICH-based motherboard. Most of the time enabling RAID in the system’s BIOS after you install windows with RAID disabled will definitely land you to a severe BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Anyways you can get or install the main IRST software after updating the driver.

[sushantbankar]

For your knowledge, you can also update your drive using the Disk Manager. You know that the Intel Rapid Storage Technology F6 Driver Diskettes is only about 0.30 MB in size so therefore you need to always uncompress the zip file once before you always use it. You can get the intel 5 series chipset downloaded from intel downloads. There’s no issue with the installation of the IRST software as this software can be installed later after you update the driver.

As said above you can easily download the Intel Rapid Storage Technology later on after the updates, but then the question arises from where you can get it. But now that’s not an issue, you can get the direct download from here, Intel RST

Just click on the link download the zip file and as said above you need to unzip or uncompress the file only once before using it. This IRST is actually used to preinstall the RAID drivers. The files can also be used to create floppy disks in order to get the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver preinstalled during the windows setup.