RAID issues on my Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
My old machine is an Asus A8N SLI Deluxe, and I’m trying to set it up as a media centre PC down in my media room. I picked up a few 1-TB drives to create a RAID-5 array (my old 500MB x 4 in RAID-5 is full, if you can believe it), and thought that would be perfect since the mobo has onboard RAID-5 Using a SiI 3114 chipset.
Unfortunately, when I used all four drives in a RAID array, it seemed that the maximum supported size seemed to be 746 GB (yes, smaller than a single drive!!). That isn’t very useful. Three drives gave the correct size, but that’s wasting a lot of space.
Usually, BIOS updates fix these little glitches; unfortunately, this being an old motherboard, ASUS hadn’t updated the BIOS much in several years. I was running the latest 1805 bios already, but that included the very old 5.1.36 BIOS for the Silicon Image 3114 RAID controller – they were up to 5.5 now! (5.4.03 for embedded controllers)
Google again comes to my aid – an updated BIOS for the A8N SLI Deluxe including the latest RAID drivers!. Somebody at the nvidia forums had used the Award Bios Editor to include those drivers. Perfect! (Local copy of the latest & most up to date BIOS: 1805_SI3114_5403_NVRAID_560.zip)
Now, to copy over my 1.5 TB of data…
