1
I have recently put together a new high-end gaming / work PC.
The relevant hardware items for this problem are as follows:
1 x ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z Intel motherboard
2 x Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 6Gb/s
1 x Western Digital Caviar Green 750GB 3Gb/s
1 x Crucial M4 256GB SSD (Win 7 Here)
1 x Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz
I have the hard drives set up as follows:
Marvel SATA controller:
0->Western Digital Green
1->M4 SSD (Boot Disk With Windows 7)
Intel Sata Controller:
0->Black Drive (raid 0 member)
1->Black Drive (raid 0 member)
The problem:
If the Intel controller is set to RAID, Windows 7 will not boot (Even though Win 7 is on the other controller). I get a "Please insert proper boot item" error.
Before anyone asks, I ensured that the proper boot order was selected. My BIOS even allows me to select a device and immediately boot from that device - I still got the error when selecting the M4.
As soon as I change the Intel controller to AHCI mode, the system boots normally.
Does anyone know what's going on? I updated the motherboard and SATA drivers and still nothing.
Note: I forgot that my caviar black drives are 6Gb/s hence I would like to make use of all 4 of my 6.0Gb/s connections.
user993735
Posted 2011-10-13T15:13:30.600
Reputation: 11
Why do you use the Marvel controller for the SSD? External controller never as fast as the chipset controller. My advice: Only use 6 SATA ports of the chipset and disable the Marvel - it's useless. There is no speed loss but a you gain much more less problems. – Robert – 2011-10-13T15:21:24.883
I have 8 SATA Drives. 4 are 6gb/s and 4 are 3gb/s Unfortunately 2 of the 6gb/s are from the Marvel Controller. I did not want to use the Marvel controller for raid so I put the SSD on there instead. – None – 2011-10-13T15:30:17.263
1YOu have only one device where it makes a difference if you use SATA6Gb or not: The SSD. All other devices are so slow that it makes exactly no difference if you use SATA6Gb or not. – Robert – 2011-10-13T17:57:33.443