Question about hard disk controller BIOS settings

piotrg

Hello

I have a WHS2011 with 4 x 3TB drives. At first WHS would not detect the 3TB on the hard disks. I had to then change my BIOS setting for IDE to "Seperate IDE" and then WHS recognized the full 3TB. I was then able to format the drives and then change the BIOS setting back to RAID/AHCI. 

Now my WHS and Drivepool see the 3TB hard disks and everything works. However WHS is still reporting they are 746GB disks since the BIOS is set to RAID/AHCI.

My question is if I change back to "Seperate IDE" and start WHS, will my drivepool become corrupt in any way as I made it when the BIOS was set to RAID/AHCI?

I've read that there is no performance loss when using "Seperate IDE" instead of RAID/AHCI, so I'd prefer to have WHS detecting the drives as 3TB instead of as 746GB.

Shane

Hi piotrg. What motherboard are you using? Are the four 3TB drives the only drives or do you have others?

piotrg

Hello Shane.

I am running a HP xw6600. Sata port 1 is my system drive, port 2, 3, 4, and 5 are 3TB disks, port 6 is a 2TB disk.

I went ahead and backed up all my data on external disks and then tried what I asked about. As soon as I changed to "Seperate IDE", my SATA port 5 and 6 (I guess they are on a seperate controller to the first 4) disappeared from my WHS2011. One of the new 3TB was on port 5. So I then shutdown and plugged the new 3TB into one of the first 4 ports. Booted up WHS and formatted the disk as 3TB. I didn't dare launch the WHS Dashboard while doing any of these steps. 

I then changed the BIOS to RAID/AHCI again and plugged the new 3TB into port 5. 

WHS and Drivepool now detected all the 3TB disks and I was able to add the new disk to the pool.

I guess the moral of the story is that essentially it's important to back up data before doing anything regarding changing drives, drivers, etc. 

New small problem I am having is that in Stablebit Scanner, all the 3TB disk are still reported as 746GB even though WHS is detecting them as 3TB. The scanner still works so I'm inclined to just leave it. Would you have an idea why this is happening?

Shane

It would be good to have your system properly recognising their sizes.

1. Make sure you are using GPT instead of MBR for large drives. See this MSDN article [link].

2. You may wish to check HP's website to see if there is a WHS-compatible driver for the second controller on your motherboard, so that you can use all six ports in Separate IDE mode. A quick look shows no Server 2008 R2 support for that model. You could try their Win7 x64 drivers or you could try Intel's download for Server 2008 R2 [link], that might work.

2a. If you already have RST, make sure you have version 10.1 or newer. Earlier versions may cause the 746GB issue.

Shane

Hmm. Yes, download the newest RST for Server 2008 R2 from Intel, as the HP website is using version 9.6 which could be the source of your problems.

piotrg

Thank you Shane, but unfortunately the latest Intel RST drivers for Windows Server 2008 R2 don't work.



Any ideas?

piotrg

I got it working!

WHS2011 kept saying that the installed driver was already the correct one, even though it was version 9.6. So I downloaded the zip of just the drivers and manually installed the controller instead of using the detecting wizard.

BIOS is in AHCI/RAID mode and WHS2011 and Scanner report the disks as 3TB.

Thank you for your help Shane and kudos on a great set of addons for WHS!

Shane

You're welcome. And the kudos go to Alex, I'm just a happy customer / forum volunteer.