replacement options for gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2

[japilch]

I have been reading about the HPA issues that Gigabyte boards have - I was looking to upgrade to 4.7 and increase the size of my parity from 1 T to 2T when I started reading.

 

what replacement boards would work with the other hardware I have. I dont want to have to replace cpu and memory as well so was thinking of the asrock A770DE+ or the biostar equivalent. I am trying to reuse the memory and cpu - are there any other suggestions? I have an old pci 8Mb videocard so onboard video not a deal breaker.

looking at the $50 - 70 range.

thanks in advance

 

Jeff

[Rajahal]

Any AM3 board that takes DDR2 RAM should work.  How many drives do you want to support?

 

The ASRock board you chose looks fine.  I wouldn't choose it because of the lack of onboard video, but since you are OK with that then you could just stop your search there if you wish.  The price is certain right.

[japilch]

thanks for your reply Raj, currently I have 6 discs in my array - I am going to add another 3 into 2 icydock and add a sata card ( thinking about the rosewell 218) for a total of 9 -that is about all my case will hold .

 

will look seriously at the asrock - if I can lay my hands on that old matrox pci card I have somewhere

[SSD]

Do you have HPAs now on any of your disks?  Swapping motherboards does not remove HPAs, just stops new ones from being created. Many Gigabyte motherboards have firmware updates that default to not creating HPAs. Might want to investigate that before buying another MB.

[japilch]

yes i do - I think atleast 1- if not more - I have a series 1 board and research on this forum says that updating bios will not get me to a bios that disables hpa by default- that was the 1st thing I checked - as I would prefer NOT to have to buy another MB- would prefer to be buying HDD's intead