Asus Sabertooth 990FX/GEN3 R2.0

[HeikoRieger]

Hi,

I've bought the RAID card 6405E from Adaptec like NeoGen did.
Now I have a problem to find a motherboard that is compatible with this RAID card.
I've bought the ASUS M5A99X-Evo R2.0 and the 6405E card but unfortunately they are not compatible.
But I want to make this RAID card work in my system.
I also bought the AMD 8350 with 4 times G.Skill 8GB 1866MHz. The CPU and the RAM were working without any problems with this mainboard.
So I sent back the mainboard and now I am looking for a new mainboard which should work with all my equipment.
Maybe the Asus Sabertooth 990FX/GEN3 R2.0 could work.

[AMDave]

Hej Heiko!
Welcome to the AMD Users forum.

I sent NeoGen a PM to see if he can give you some expert advice since he has experience with that model and those issues.

[Dirk Broer]

Maybe the Asus Sabertooth 990FX/GEN3 R2.0 could work.

Been searching for this mobo for more than two years now....as well as this board:

[HeikoRieger]

Dirk,
You can't find that mobo in the Netherlands?
Here in Sweden is it available and I am sure also in Germany.

Sorry. ..the Gen3 is not available any more in Europe.

Now my question: Is the normal sabertooth r2.0 also good and will my raid card work?

[Dirk Broer]

Hi Heiko,

I can't see why not, the main difference between the Gen3 R2.0 and the 'plain' R2.0 is the controller chip that takes care of the PCIe 3.0.

On the other hand, neither is named in the compatibility report by Adaptec, FWIW.

[HeikoRieger]

Hi Dirk,

I can't see why not, the main difference between the Gen3 R2.0 and the 'plain' R2.0 is the controller chip that takes care of the PCIe 3.0.

On the other hand, neither is named in the compatibility report by Adaptec, FWIW.

I've bought the "ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0" and the Adadptec RAID-controller is not working. The same problems like with the other boards.
So now I've decided to send the Adaptec-card back and looking for another hardware-RAID-controller.

So I've found this one:
LSI MegaRAID SAS 9341-4i

megaraid-sas-9341-4i,0.jpg

With this card is the problem. The "ASUS Sabertooth 990FX" is in the compatibility list but not the 'R2.0'.
So the next question is:
Work this RAID-card also in my 'R2.0' motherboard?
What is the difference between the plain 'Sabertooth 990FX' and the 'R2.0'?

Oh...I've just read it's a software raid-controller.
So now the next one:
LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i

megaraid-sas-9260-4i,0.jpg

This is really a hardware-RAID-controller.

[Dirk Broer]

RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60, now we're talking RAID..

RAID (originally Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, now commonly Redundant Array of Independent Disks -they've found out that disks do not come inexpensive) is a data storage virtualisation technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into a single logical unit for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both.

Raid Level	Method	Read performance	Write performance	Minimum disks needed	Data protection	Fault tolerance	Scheme
0	striping, without mirroring or parity	Better	Better	2	None (!)	No (!)
1	data mirroring, without parity or striping	Better	Slower	2	Mirror	Yes
5	block-level striping with distributed parity	Better	Much slower	3	Parity, supports single disk failure	Yes
6	block-level striping with double distributed parity	Better	Very much slower	4	Parity, supports two disks failures	Yes
10 (1+0)	striped data across mirrored pairs	Better	Bit slower	4	Mirror, one disk failure in each sub-array	Yes
50 (5+0)	straight block-level striping of RAID 0 with the distributed parity of RAID 5	Better	Slower	6	Parity, One disk failure in each sub-array	Yes
60 (6+0)	straight block-level striping of RAID 0 with the distributed double parity of RAID 6	Better	Slower	8	Parity, Two disks failures in each sub-array	Yes

[NeoGen]

Hej Heiko!
Welcome to the AMD Users forum.

I sent NeoGen a PM to see if he can give you some expert advice since he has experience with that model and those issues.

Seeing the message a bit too late I guess, but to me the Adaptec 6405E has been working without a hitch, I have it installed on an Asus Sabertooth 990FX/GEN3 R2.0 with the latest BIOS version on the mobo and latest firmware version on the RAID controller itself.
Adaptec has been changing hands a lot... it went from Adaptec... to PMC-Sierra... to Microsemi nowadays. But regardless of what the company is called, the product works wonders even with older hard drives, I just wish it had more cache memory.
My favorite HDD monitoring software, Hard Disk Sentinel, unfortunately cannot see the drives through the controller to monitor SMART values, but using Adaptec's Maxview Storage Manager works.