Or - It could just be that the PSU cannot support all the drives starting-up at the same time.
You should check the power taken by each drive on each of the power lines at: startup, max usage of the drive (seek/write/verify/read) when already spinning Add in the controller needs: Base motherboard usage + CPU usage + Memory usage + Video board usage + Wireless connector + Lan board + USB/Firewire draw - both controller and powerline. And ... the required fans to cool all that - I do hope your caddies incorporate fans It seems to me that you already have 6, or perhaps 8 P-ATA drives and now 2 more S-ATA drives. Crudely - that's 10 drives @ 27watts each, plus CPU at 100 watts, memory - say 20 watts, video - 5 watts, LAN and other ancillaries usage at startup plus fans - perhaps 30 watts to wind them up that's 400 watts actual draw from the PSU, without looking at the max on each voltage line Re the memory usage, I'd have thought that was unlikely - I would expect that either they are engineered/designed to co-exist in the system, or they would always require the same fixed memory locations Perhaps an IRQ conflict - but the manufacturers should be able to confirm, or deny that or the memory problem. If they don't seem interested, then that would be something to post to people like Toms Hardware, and the Microsoft hardware certification section (The controllers are Microsoft XP certified I hope) Do the Systems/add-in boards/drives have a delayed startup facility/option Also - you may find that a PCI-x controller may speedup the system - remembering that the base PCI connections have a single memory access path that means the drive controllers get memory access asynchronously, while the new master/x PCI connections run at about 4 x the old PCI connection speed, and can run concurrently, with a large number of 'intelligent' drives that may double the actual system throughput. JimB ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Funck" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2006 6:25 PM Recently at work, we added a couple of SATA drives to a rather heavily loaded PC, which already had a Maxtor/Promise Tx2 ATA controller card installed to add some additional disks in removeable caddies. The motherboard is an ASUS P4G8X, with a P4/Xeon chip installed. The motherboard has been very reliable, however, as you'll read below, is becoming rather dated. Using the builtin motherboard SATA support, we plugged in a 400G Seagate SATA drive. The BIOS recognized the IDE disks, the Maxtor card recognized the drives plugged into it connector, and the SATA BIOS recognized the SATA drive plugged into its connector (all determined by watching the screen as the system booted up). But after the screen where the BIOS prints out PCI IRQ assignments, the screen went blank, and Windows didn't boot. By process of induction, deduction, and intuition we've determined that the Maxtor Tx2 and SATA controller can't coexist, at least during the boot phase. We think this is because their respective BIOS overlays end up in the same memory location. Neither the motherboard BIOS nor the Maxtor Tx2 card appear to have a method for changing where their BIOS's get loaded. Have you seen this sort of thing? Are there any workarounds? What we found was that if we turned off the SATA drive during boot (using the key in the caddy), and then turned it back on after Windows booted, all is well. We think this is because Windows doesn't depend upon the SATA and IDE controller card/chip's BIOS to access the drive. As if this wasn't enough excitement, we added a new 750G Seagate drive to the mix. In this case the SATA BIOS would just hang, even if the Maxtor Tx2 card was removed. Later we found that some motherboard's (apparently this Asus is one of them) do not support SATA drives larger than 500G. [we have the latest BIOS, but it is dated 2003, I believe]. Again, however, if we turned the drive off until after Windows booted, then all is well. What we think might improve the situaion is a PCI-based SATA controller card that will let us jumper/program its settings so that it relocates its BIOS overaly in a location other than where the Maxtor Tx2 card locates its BIOS. It would be nice if this SATA card let us step around the motherboard BIOS's 500G limitation, but if that limitation is in the BIOS proper we're probably out of luck. Yes, it looking like it is time to upgrade the motherboard/cpu. -- ---------------------------------------- The WIN-HOME mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
