Warning on M/Boards using Via VT8237 SATA chip

[Roscoe62]

Hi all,

 

Just wanted to put a quick warning in here for those trying out different m/boards for use with UnRAID. I've been trying to get the Gigabyte K8VT800 Pro working with UnRAID. This m/board uses a Via VT8237 chip to control the onboard SATA drives. Tom put up a version of UnRAID that supports the VT8237 chip but unfortunately it appears this chip does NOT support SATA2 drives at all.

 

From what I've seen so far all SATA drives 500Gb or larger are SATA2 drives so if you need the onboard SATA controller to plug larger drives into, you may have problems. A FAQ on the Gigabyte website mentions this problem and says there are some SATA2 drives that can be 'downgraded' to SATA1 performance using a jumper directly on the HDD circuitboard. I have tried this with my Seagate drives but the m/board still didn't recognise the drive and acted as though no drive was connected - i.e. no difference.

 

FWIW....I connected my Seagate SATA2 drives directly to my Promise SATA300TX4 PCI controller card and that worked just fine.

 

In the end I'm going to go for an ASUS P5PE-VM m/board in the hopes I won't have this problem.

[kansei]

I was able to get the VIA VT8237 to work by jumping the SATA-2 drives into "150 MB/s mode".  I have WD 640 GB drives (WD6400AAKS)