AMD A75 (Hudson-D3) chipset compatibility

[xetal]

hello,
i'm looking for buying an amd mitx mobo: Gigabyte GA-A75N-USB3 ( http://www.gigabyte.com/products/produc ... id=4030#sp ). it would be nice to know how AMD A75 (Hudson-D3) chipset raid functions are compatible with HDSentinel? i'm not shure does in HDSentinel compatibility list mentioned "AMD RAID Controller" applies for A75 chipset also. so, using drives in raid mode with windows (xp), for individual drives can S.M.A.R.T. data retreieved?

[hdsentinel]

Hi,

Thanks for your message and question.

While this motherboard seems nice, I absolutely do not recommend to use any AMD chipset for RAID.

Yes, as displayed on the compatibility list for RAID controllers ( http://www.hdsentinel.com/compatibility ... ollers.php ) the "AMD RAID controller" in general is supported (yes, this includes the chipset of AMD A75 of this motherboard), please look at the "comments" section below the list for an important notice:

"the (AMD) RAID controller provides information about only one device per array, after installing the driver from Driver Zone. This is a limitation of the RAID controller, not a bug / limitation of Hard Disk Sentinel software."

So if you plan to use any AMD chipset for RAID, you'll get hard disk (SSD) status information only for standalone drives and only ONE drive per array because of the limitation of the AMD RAID controller and its driver (not the limitation of Hard Disk Sentinel).
As you can see the list, there is no such limitation of other RAID controllers, so I'd recommend to use any other (much better) controller, instead of the AMD chipset.

We constantly try to "push" AMD to make better drivers and allow accessing hard disk status information for other drives also. However, they completely ignore all requests - which is really shame as it seems they are not interested in improving their products and thus increase the satisfaction of their customers.

[xetal]

Hi,

Thanks for your message and question.

While this motherboard seems nice, I absolutely do not recommend to use any AMD chipset for RAID.

thanx for quick replay

i'm looking for building some kind of small (itx or matx) and as-cheap-as-reasonable "home server". as hard disks capacities enlarges and disk quality decreases, using raid appears must have solution and small AMD mobos (with onboard AMD chipset based RAID) seemed very promising: cheap, bunch of sata3 ports with raid functions ... but according to your opinion, those mobos fall away :/

Yes, as displayed on the compatibility list for RAID controllers ( http://www.hdsentinel.com/compatibility ... ollers.php ) the "AMD RAID controller" in general is supported (yes, this includes the chipset of AMD A75 of this motherboard), please look at the "comments" section below the list for an important notice:

"the (AMD) RAID controller provides information about only one device per array, after installing the driver from Driver Zone. This is a limitation of the RAID controller, not a bug / limitation of Hard Disk Sentinel software."

So if you plan to use any AMD chipset for RAID, you'll get hard disk (SSD) status information only for standalone drives and only ONE drive per array because of the limitation of the AMD RAID controller and its driver (not the limitation of Hard Disk Sentinel).
As you can see the list, there is no such limitation of other RAID controllers, so I'd recommend to use any other (much better) controller, instead of the AMD chipset.

i assume that all the story applies also for the upcoming A85X (Hudson-D4) ... until improved drivers appear (what in turn is not very likely)?

We constantly try to "push" AMD to make better drivers and allow accessing hard disk status information for other drives also. However, they completely ignore all requests - which is really shame as it seems they are not interested in improving their products and thus increase the satisfaction of their customers.

but how about intel sandy bridge and ivy bridge chipset with onboard raid?

[hdsentinel]

I see and completely agree.

The Intel onboard RAID should be fine, all hard disks/SSDs connected and configured to RAID should be detected by latest version of Hard Disk Sentinel.

[xetal]

ok, and thanks for clearing up.

concernning AMD, i'm disappointed. i was thinking to build my next rigs (home server and workstation) based on AMD cpu and thus leaving INTEL, but according to this thread this step would not be smart at all

option to consider: add an extra pci-e sata3 RAID addon card is encircled with pci-e 2.0 lane bandwith bottlenck (500 MB/s) compared to sata3 (600 MB/s). majority of (butgetable) entry-level addon card's (even with more than 2 sata ports) are with pci-e 1x physical interface, 4-lane 4-port cards are about 2,5times expensive. for example: in newegg.com rocketraid 620 (pci-e 2.0*1 2 sata ports) costs about 40usd, rocketraid 640 (pci-e 2.0*4, 4 sata ports) 100usd. buying from closest webstore (verkkokauppa.com) respectively: 75eur and 207eur. so no point to add onto cheap mobo (about 70eur) three times expensive addon card as alternative with all-onboard costs about 100eur

[hdsentinel]

I completely understand and agree!
Personally I really hope AMD will improve their drivers and RAID functionality, otherwise they may lose customers ....

Yes, I wanted to recommend the HighPoint RR 620 as it is fully compatible with Hard Disk Sentinel and very cheap SATA 3 controller, just I agree that it may be easier and more economic in all ways (price, size, power consumption) to use the integrated controller

[xetal]

Hi,
While this motherboard seems nice, I absolutely do not recommend to use any AMD chipset for RAID.
.

i'm curious, besides AMD drivers partial infunctionality which prevents certain data to be acquired by s.m.a.r.t viewers, in professional view, what is wrong (if the word "wrong" is correct word to describe subject in this context) with AMD chipset(s) RAID function? so, main reason are poorly written direvers, but what else?

i never touched any amd chipset onboard raid, googling for user reviews (with screenshots and matter-of-fact story) was ineffective (due high rate of "noise"). i only can imagine the "cons":
* lack of options (bios level, gui level)
* no drivers for alternative os'es (linux, etc)
* high rate of data error
* not unloading raid from main cpu(s)
* high cpu usage
* half-baked user interface
* hardware level bottlenecks
* imcompatible with (a lot of) hardware (ie hdd's, especially ssd)
* frequent driver-caused bsod
* performance loss due (driver?) not correctly understanding (and interpreting) advanced format drives
* ...

[hdsentinel]

The biggest "cons" from my viewpoint is:

- AMD released the chipsets and especially the RAID controllers with incomplete drivers. Usually the released driver provides very low performance, caused high number of compatibility issues and does not allow accessing S.M.A.R.T. information - even for standalone hard disks, not only for disks in RAID

- When we try to upgrade drivers to most recent versions (which is also incomplete, eg. allow accessing S.M.A.R.T. information of only one hard disk in RAID, but fortunately access of standalone drives are possible), the chipset installer (100+ Mbytes) runs, installs, shows lots of ads of games, etc.... and then DOES NOTHING, the RAID driver is not updated in most of cases

- When we try to manually update drivers, it is a very painful procedure and can hardly manage that: AMD makes things more difficult as they call different chipset RAID controllers similarly and users need to "guess" (try...) which package they need and hope that one will work with their hardware. Personally every day I receive dozens of reports about such AMD systems just to check which driver to try, how to manually install it, etc...
You may find such entry in this forum also about it.

The above are really annoying, but would not be a big problem if AMD would show any signs of progress or at least if they would say "we'll try to improve the situation". This does not happen. In my opinion the "worst" with AMD is that AMD thinks this situation is good. They do nothing to improve their chipset drivers and/or installation packages. In my understanding they completely ignore their customers, people who selected their products and expect proper support, proper drivers.


So maybe other factors you mentioned are applicable, I'm not sure, personally I did not check (eg. other OSes), the above points are enough to say it is better to avoid AMD chipset RAID.
Shame.

For standalone drives (or software RAID) it may be OK as then S.M.A.R.T. information could be detected and displayed without problems.