I've just purchased a new Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 and I'm not sure it is going to work as I expected.

 

I have 6 SATA drives, connected to the 6 onboard SATA3 ports on the motherboard, knowing that it is recommended to run unRAID drives as AHCI I set it in the BIOS, all very simple, I then reboot and then notice that my last 2 SATA drives on port 5 & 6 have gone from POST, after swapping cables, ports to eliminate cable issue, ports 5 & 6 are dead.

 

Much head scratching later, I tried changing the BIOS SATA settings to the defaults, reboot and all 6 drives POST.

 

The options in the BIOS are:

onchip SATA enabled/disabled - I have it enabled

 

And I set the SATA port settings from

SATA PORT 1-4 IDE

SATA PORT 5-6 IDE

 

To

SATA PORT 1-4 AHCI

SATA PORT 5-6 AHCI

 

But when I do that anything connected to port 5 & 6 are not detected.

 

So will unRAID work fine not using AHCI?

 

Ok sanity check required, I've just read this post

http://zfsguru.com/forum/zfsgurusupport/222

 

So if I've read this I can't have all 6 ports as AHCI?

 

Ok, what I have done is set back to:

To

SATA PORT 1-4 AHCI

SATA PORT 5-6 AHCI

 

At POST it only recognizes port 1 -4 as having drives connected, however, if I continue to boot into unRAID, unRAID recognizes all the drives as being present - is ok to run unRAID in this mode?

When you set ports 5 & 6 to AHCI then they are NOT displayed during BIOS port, but are available to unRAID.

 

Using the IDE setting gives a performance hit and is not recommended.

 

This behavior is mentioned in the ASUS user guide.

I think this sentence in the manual confused me

When this item is set to (AHCI), the information of the SATA connectors 1-6 can be seen only under the OS environment or during POST.

 

So I set 1-6 to AHCI yet as I said, ports 5 & 6 cannot be seen during post, where as the above implies they should be.

 

Is there a command I can run to check how unRAID has detected the drive on 5 & 6?