[bichonn]

Has anyone been able to have one of those Sil 0680 card working with an A7N8X DLX, which already has a SIl chipset SATA controler?

[engine]

Try flashing to a previous version of the 0680A BIOS. At least 3.2.00

Download them here -> http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.ph...&postcount=117

Regards.

[TheDiggler]

Can an 0680 v3.0.93 SI ATA Controller experience issues with devices in the secondary channel if there is a drive that may not properly be jumpered in the primary channel? The reason I ask is that I have two optical drives on the secondary and one 160 GB WD on the primary. I read somewhere that WD can act strange if not jumpered right? I believe that WD 160 is jumpered as Master, even though it does not have a slave.

The reason I ask it just seems ever since I moved my 0680 into this NForce2 board it has been acting strange. Sometimes it seems the WD 160 is slow and the burner I have on the secondary channel seems to produce more bad burns. Today I burnt a disc at 4X and it ended up burning at 2X, even though I have burnt from this same 50 pck at 4X. Just really strange things. Came across that Western Digital data and thought maybe that has something to do with my problems.

Anyone have any clues?

[engine]

TheDiggler

What nForce 2 board are you talking about?

If your mobo does have an "Enhance PCI Performance" BIOS option, make sure it is set to "Disable".

Regards.

[TheDiggler]

Thanks for the reply. It is an A7N8X-X rev 2 board, with the 1011 (latest) BIOS. I don't think I saw the "Enhance PCI" in the BIOS maybe a missed it. What are your thoughts on the jumper ont he primary? Lastly, I had the card on the last PCI slot then moved it up one slot. Don't know if I should move it again...

Thanks again...

[engine]

If you have the HDD on the primary alone, there should be no problems with the jumper configurations. If you had another drive on the primary you could have problems if the jumpers on the drives were both set to master or slave simultaneously. Since you have one drive alone, there should be no problems with the jumpers.

There should be three options for the jumpers. "Master", "Slave" and "Cable Select".

Make sure you use an 80 pin cable for the HDD. Or you will experience loss of performance.

The 0680 card is RAID or IDE?

You can also try to flash your card with other versions of the BIOS. Check this -> http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.ph...&postcount=117

If your board has an onboard Silicon Image chip do not try versions above 3.2.00!

Regards.

[TheDiggler]

Originally Posted by engine

If you have the HDD on the primary alone, there should be no problems with the jumper configurations. If you had another drive on the primary you could have problems if the jumpers on the drives were both set to master or slave simultaneously. Since you have one drive alone, there should be no problems with the jumpers.

There should be three options for the jumpers. "Master", "Slave" and "Cable Select".

Make sure you use an 80 pin cable for the HDD. Or you will experience loss of performance.

The 0680 card is RAID or IDE?

You can also try to flash your card with other versions of the BIOS. Check this -> http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.ph...&postcount=117

If your board has an onboard Silicon Image chip do not try versions above 3.2.00!

Regards.

I have an 80 pin cable on both the optical drives and the WD 160. I have considered the flash but I have not checked if I can even flash the card. The card is a couple years old and don't believe it supports RAID (which is not important). The thought on the jumper was that if there is something specific to Western Digital drives that it might be a source of the problem and not the controller itself. It also seems, to me, that ever since I connected my DVD-ROM drive to slave on the Secondary channel that things started to get weird. Don't know because the problems seem to be completely random in nature.

[engine]

If you have optical drives on that card, you don´t even want RAID.

If the problems started to reveal after a drive was added it could be the Power Suply. In that case you would need more watts.

Regards.

[TheDiggler]

Yeh, I have a 465 Enermax and using Motherboard Monitor and everything appears fine. On a somewhat related issue, I was thinking of rearrange things a bit. The WD 160 is sitting on the primary master channel, alone. I have a 300 gb Seagate on my secondary channel setup as master, alone. I was thinking of moving the WD 160 off and slave it to the 300 Seagate. That way all my HD's are off the controller, and I can split my optical drives 1 for each channel on my controller. However, I have 3 HD's (2 on primary, 1 Seagate via secondary channels on the mobo IDE) already in there and in order to do this I would have to sandwich the 160, having four HD's in the case on top of one another. My biggest concern naturally is way to much heat with 4 drives on top of one another.

What do you think engine? Oh, and thanks for all the suggestions.

[engine]

If you are going to "sandwich" the Hard Drives, make sure you place the hottest ones on the outside, and the coolest one between the other two. If Motherboard Monitor doesn´t report HDD temps, you can try SpeedFan.

Since you have a lot of Hard Drives and Optical Drives and all that produces heat, I wonder if your random problems are heat related. Some optical drives produce great amounts of heat too. In that case you can try improving the cooling through your case. Place one intake fan on the front of your case, and another one on the rear side blowing out from the case. If your case alows this. No need for special stuff. Since your problems are somewhat random anything better should be enough.

Regards.

[TheDiggler]

OK, thanks for the help. I am going to keep on eye on everything and see if I can somehow pinpoint exactly where the problem may be occurring. Worse case I will need to rewire some things and take a look at the heat issue. The strange thing, when I originally setup everything I had mass data corruption when copying between the drives. I was able to get this corrected and have not had any data corruption but now these seemingly random problems. The one problem, I think is connected, is that my old reliable NEC 1300A has issues when burning from anything on the mobo IDE or the SI Controller HD. The disc will 80% of the time produce a glitch during playback in my DVD standalone. So now I burn form a USB ext. HD and all my burns playback perfectly fine. Strange things like that. In this particular case it may be that my 80 pin (extra long) IDE cable MAY be the problem but not sure yet.

Thanks once again for all the advice.

[engine]

The IDE cable lenght standard is 45 cm (centimeters) if I am not mistaken. IDE cables up to 60 cm didn´t show issues at least on online reviews. I have a 60 cm IDE cable and it works fine!

You can try other IDE cables if you think they are an hypotetical issue.

Regards.

[Majikk]

Could someone who knows recommend a good compatible addon card for an ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe Rev2.0 motherboard?? I have serial harddrives hooked up to the sb, and a couple harddrives on the IDE channels, as well as two opticals.. The opticals are all I would want to be moving to the new card, which are a dvd-rom, and cd-rw only.

[TheDiggler]

Originally Posted by Majikk

Could someone who knows recommend a good compatible addon card for an ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe Rev2.0 motherboard?? I have serial harddrives hooked up to the sb, and a couple harddrives on the IDE channels, as well as two opticals.. The opticals are all I would want to be moving to the new card, which are a dvd-rom, and cd-rw only.

From everything I know and have read it sounds like Silicon Image chipped controllers are better at dealing with opticals. I have an old 0680 working with my A7N8X-X board. I have had problems though but I think it has little to do with an actual hardware compatibility.

[_Pete_]

I have just bought an ITE 8212F chipset card. There's another chip on it. It says on the other chip ICE27C010-45PC 234. Could you tell me whether it's programmable or not?

[Juhuslik]

Is it RAID or IDE?
It's probably not programmable.

[_Pete_]

It's a RAID controller but in the configuration menu it has the IDE option. Still it doesn't "see" my Liteon burner. What can I do?

[_Pete_]

I've just tried to program the eeprom. The ICE-something chip is not programmable, though.

[engine]

Where on Europe can I buy a card based on an ITE chip, wich is flashable?

Regards.

[Juhuslik]

I know that ST-Lab is making both SilA0680 and ITE8212F based cards.
http://www.st-lab.com/io.html
Here You can find the model numbers and specifications.
The good thing is that both Sil and ITE ATA/ATA RAID cards are flashable.

[engine]

Thanks for your reply.

I don´t care about Silicon Image based cards. I have two of them, based on the 0680 chip and they don´t work in UDMA mode with optical drives. And I can chose between lots of brands based on Silicon Image chips that are selling now in my country.

So far I know that ST Lab an Syba are making IDE cards based on ITE chips. If anyone knows more brands, please let me know. That will help me on my research. But what I am looking for are stores in Western European Countries like, UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg, since I can´t find them here in Portugal. I can undestand pretty well English, Spanish and some French. So I am limited to these languages. UK, Ireland and Spain are preferable.

Regards.

[_Pete_]

You can get ITE based cards quite easily in Poland, but those with RAID don't support opticals; at least most of them. I'm looking for an ITE based card which is flashable myself. Try www.komputronik.pl or www.xpower-europe.com/

[engine]

Hi _Pete_

Thanks for your reply.

After some research, I know these manufacturers make cards based on the IT8212F chip:

Syba -> http://www.syba.com/

ST Lab -> http://www.st-lab.com/

Winic -> http://www.winic.com/

Syba makes both ATAPI and RAID cards and both are flashable.

ST Lab also makes both ATAPI and RAID, but I don´t know if they are flashable.

Winic makes a RAID card that is flashable. Both the RAID and the ATAPI BIOS are downloadable from their site.

I can´t find these ITE based cards in Portugal or Spain. I found them in some French sites, but my French is not that good.

I am still searching for more options.

Before buying internationally I will ask the usual Portuguese stores if they can find these products in the resellers. But before doing that I need to study very well the possible options.

Regards.

[engine]

Another one to the list:

Lycom -> http://www.lycom.com.tw/

They manufacture a RAID card based on IT8212F. I assume it is flashable. Since I have their RAID card based on the Silicon Image 0680A chip and it is flashable. By the picture of the card in their site, you can see it has a small flash chip on it.

Regards.

[Garybrown02]

I have a Philips DVDR1648P1 that I use to burn my 8x DVD's. The drive is a 16x drive, but will only burn discs at an average speed of 2.4x. Compared to 6.8x average speed up to now. It's taking 25 mins to burn a full single layered DVD on the fly. I know they say don't burn 'on the fly', but I've been doing it for years and never normally have a problem.

My setup is as follows:

Primary Master - 40gb hard drive
Primary Slave - 160gb hard drive
Secondary Master - Sony DVD-ROM DDU1612
Secondary Slave - Philips DVDR1648P1
I'm using Alcohol 120% to burn my discs

To combat this problem I tried uninstalling the Secondary IDE controller (it worked the last time I had the same problem), but after uninstalling 3 times the discs burn a bit faster for the first disc after the reboot, but it's back to 2.4x after that.

Please help!