I built a socket 939 system with a GA-K8N Ultra-9 motherboard in June of 2005. It had 4 SATA-I ports and 4-SATA-II ports. Unfortunately, I could never get the SATA-I ports to work and resorted to several add-in cards. In 2009, I upgraded to an ASUS P6T6 WS REVOLUTION X58 with 2x onboard SAS connectors. When I tried to attached a Sans Digital tower via a Sil 3132 based eSATA card, the unit failed to boot. Removing the card restored the ability to boot the system. Another Sil 3132 based internal SATA-II card that I had previously used in the Gigabyte system also prevented the system from booting. Reading up on the problem it turns out there is not sufficient BIOS memory for the SATA, SAS and a third card (even though I was not using the additional controller to boot the system). I passed this off as a problem specific to this motherboard.
Fast forward to last month. I re-built the GA-K8N Ultra-9 motherboard based system in a general upgrade using a Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 MB. I found that this new system would not boot with the Sil eSATA/Sans Digital tower attached. If I powered down the Sans Digital until the system was booted, it would recognize the drives. I assumed a problem similar to the ASUS SATA/SAS motherboard and resorted to powering down the tower when I had to re-boot the system. This past week, I re-build my other socket 939 system with an inexpensive ECS A750GM-M AM3 board. Again, the Sil 3132 with hard drives attached prevented the system from booting. Putting the disks into an enclosure that allowed them to be powered down allowed the system to boot. Powering up the disks after boot and they are recognized and usable. Is this incompatibility between motherboards and add-in SATA/RAID cards usual? Or have I just had a run of bad luck? I am thinking of converting the ASUS P6T6 WS REVOLUTION to a server but need additional storage and looking for a possible solution. Thanks for your insight. Jim Maki [email protected]
