I think my ASUS P6X58D Premium motherboard has really got me backed into a corner this time. In retrospect, it may have been a poor choice. I recently bought a new ASUS DRW-24B1ST SATADVD burner, because I thought my Optiarc AD-7260S had taken a dump. During the process, I started doing some DVD quality testing using Nero DiskSpeed v.5.0.1.250 and a BenQ 1640 on the discs produced on the DRW-24B1ST and found that it was writing bad discs with both Verbatim MCC-004 and CMC Mag AM3. Bad drive?
I pulled two of my old reliable SATA DVD drives, an Optiarc AD-7200S and a Pioneer DVR-215D, off the shelf and tried them out. Now, these two drives had always produced excellent discs with Verbatim MCC-004, consistently in the 95-98% range tested with Nero DiskSpeed on a BenQ 1640. Now they're producing crap, too!
After updating everything I could think of, including the system BIOS and RAID drivers, with no improvement, I've come to the conclusion that it might be the fact that I had installed a second hard drive and changed my motherboard ICH10R SATA controller from IDE to Raid/AHCI Raid 1 mode. There is no way to exempt any of the six SATA ports from Raid/AHCI. At first I thought I could simply switch the optical drives to the Marvell 6GB/s SATA III non-RAID controller ports, but the manual says that the Marvell controller does not support ATAPI devices, only hard drives. Great!
If I'm right about the optical drives not working very well under Raid/AHCI, what do they expect people to do when they want a RAID setup but also have ATAPI optical drives in the system? I know that I could try to find a PCIe non-RAID SATA I or II controller card that truly supports ATAPI devices, but they're hard to find and it's a real crapshoot. Maybe it will work and maybe it won't.
I may try to reset the BIOS from Raid/AHCI to IDE mode, just to test these drives again. But, I can't seem to find any reliable info on what to expect when I switch from Raid/AHCI to IDE in the system BIOS and then back to Raid/AHCI again and if there's more to it than just the BIOS setting.
BTW, my operating system is Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.
My questions are:
Has anyone else experienced problems with their SATA ATAPI devices operating properly under Raid/AHCI on the Intel ICH10R chipset?
How easy is it to switch from Raid/AHCI to IDE mode in the BIOS and back again to Raid/AHCI RAID 1? Or is there more involved than just the BIOS setting.
I have had no problems with ICH10R chipset with atapi drives and AHCI.
I recently decided to crossflash the DRW-24B1ST to liteon iHAS524b, (for xbox360 purposes) and had to change setting in bios to ide to accomplish that. Had no problem with changing to ide then back either.
You might entertain a new sata cable? All of my ports are set to AHCI. I have VERY old burners going strong. I love NEC chipped optiarc drives. I have a 7200S, a 7261S, and 2 7200A's(IDE). All have seen an absurd amount of disks. My tower keeps them cool. People may not realize it, but optical drives need to be cooled too ;)
DDP, did you scare him off LOL!
I've installed raid cards, and ran optical drives off of them. Sata is Sata.
