Asus M2R32 motherboard: defective RAID/AHCI?
I mentioned in a previous post here that I picked up some additional hard drives. The 750 GB drive is running happily in an external eSATA-connected enclosure and is providing backup for my machine. The other two drives are sitting on a shelf, and will remain there indefinitely. There is a story behind their banishment from my computer. It isn’t that there is anything particularly wrong with the drives themselves: I’ve finally concluded that my Asus motherboard has crappy RAID/AHCI support.
I have spent the last couple of days repeatedly building and tearing down my machine. First I built a RAID 1 array. Bear in mind that the drives I’m using are good quality Seagate 7200.10 drives: they have full SATA2 support, including Native Command Queuing (NCQ). The drives they displaced were high-end WD Raptor 1500ADFD drives: arguably, the Raptors are better drives, but I had suspicions that WD drives might be behind my problems putting my system into standby mode in Vista. I was wrong.