RAID Utility only sees one of my drives

[sethbest]

Just got 2 brand new samsung spinpoint 750gig hd's, plugged them into my aging Chaintech 7NJL6 Mobo's SATA's (yeah i know it only supports 1.5gb/s) and fired up the raid utility built into the nforce2 chipset that i've never used.

Problem is though It will only see one drive, and will not allow me to start setting up a RAID array.

I have enabled RAID in the integrated peripherals part of the bios, and enabled it on the SATA0 and SATA1 channels. The weird part is the drives don't show up in bios un til i manualy autodetect them, then it says not found and i exit back to the "STANDARD CMOS FEATURES" page and it then displays the IDE 2 and 3 channels as both "SAMSUNG HD753LJ" which is correct. The drives when booted with another drive as master show up as functioning drives of unpartitioned space.

The first thought that comes to mind for me is that i should use some pin settings on these to adjust them to a master slave relationship, or lower them to 1.5 manualy? but their tiny manuals say nothing of the sort and they came without pins (are the hd pins no longer used on SATA? since its all supposedly done automatically maybe?).

Thanks for the help.

 

[sethbest]

I also would be interested to know if having too many arrays will suck up my cpu power, I see that the bios has the option for both PATA channels to be set up as arrays also.

aditionaly is there a disadvantage to the mirroring/striping option (guess its raid0 and raid1 at the same time) besides the halving of storage space? And is it a bad or good idea to have your boot os on a striped array?(i've read mixed opinions on this)

Sry for all the questions, new to RAID.

 

[sethbest]

Could it be that my SATA cables arn't right for RAID? i was reading somewhere that some raid systems required specific cables.

 

[sethbest]

is the nforce2's raid controller too obscure at this point for anyone to remember? worst case scenario i guess i can use both drives just as regular SATA drives.

 

[sethbest]

First time i've gotten no responses. Is this in the wrong section since its about bios, and raid utilities not necesarily hard-drive hardware?

So in summation, both drives, show up fine in bios and windows when raid is disabled. When i enable raid and reserve the 2 drives for a raid array and run the utility it only sees one drive in the utility and the bios sometimes sees 1 sometimes sees 2 but only after a manual drive check.

BUT an interesting anomoly, when plugged in with raid disabled windows loads the drives as just HD's looking for no driver info, but with RAID enabled and the drives specified windows tries to find drivers for them, but the pc isn't connected to the internet at the moment so it cannot, and they are not found in disk management.

Hope to hear from somone soon, it is awfuly lonely in here.

 

[sethbest]

Well the only thing that i can think of now is updating the raid controllers firmware, which as far as i've read is only done through updating the bios itself.

This mobo does not support winflash, so i'm trying to set it up with award flasher now through a bootdisk, but i've never had a floppy drive in this pc, and its giving me all sorts of errors with it. I'll post again once i have that resolved as to whether the updated RAID will detect the drives.