Mobo not recognozing 4th sata 6gb HDD

[play107]

i bought a new WD caviar black 2tb yesterday plugged it into to my mobo (Asus X79 formula4) 4th sata 6gb port but it didn't recognize it but if i put it in a 3gb sata port it shows up, i have a 120gb SSD and a 1TB WD green already installed in the sata 6gb and a front 3.0USB

 

[oxford373]

because your motherboard have 8 sata ports (4x6gb+4x3gb) ,6(2xsata2,4xsata3) of those ports are connected directly to X79 chipset and tow of the sata3 ports use (asmedia asm1061 controller) ,and maybe those tow ports need(asmedia asm1061 controller) driver .
all your motherboard red ports are sata3 so try the other tow sata 3 ports(intel sata3 chipset ports).
also make sure at bios that (asm1061 storage controller) is enabled ,and to enable it set it to IDE mode.

 

[play107]

If I set it to IDE , windows keeps crashing on start up

 

[Pinhedd]

What oxford said is correct. There are 8 SATA ports on the Asus Rampage IV series motherboards.

4 SATA II ports connected to the Intel X79 PCH

2 SATA III ports connected to the Intel X79 PCH

2 SATA III ports connected to an ASMedia 1061 SATA III storage controller which is connected to the Intel X79 PCH via the provided PCIe lanes

The ASMedia 1061 is a huge piece of *** and should never be used except for eSATA. You can only use hard disks on this controller, no optical disks or SSDs. They will work, but they will cause a ton of problems including stomping the Intel storage controller's OPROM which will make the other drives unbootable. Additionally, the ASMedia 106x OPROM is not compatible with the EFI boot sequence, so booting from any device on this controller is a recipe for disaster.

I highly suggest that you completely forget that you have 4 SATA III ports and avoid using the bottom two. Just use the Intel PCH controller ports and the eSATA ports. If you need more storage space, get a proper storage controller.

EDIT: leave the Intel controller in RAID mode (this is AHCI firmware RAID) or AHCI mode and either disable the ASMedia OPROM or disable the device completely. If you want to use it for eSATA or extra hard disks, leave it in AHCI mode.

 

[play107]

sorry but i don't really understand, i need to use all 4 sata ports but i can't??? even though there their, just seems silly

 

[Pinhedd]

sorry but i don't really understand, i need to use all 4 sata ports but i can't??? even though there their, just seems silly

You have 8 SATA ports, you can effectively use 6 of them. The ASMedia controllers (which the bottom two SATA III ports are connected to) are horribly horribly problematic and won't work with many devices. You can try them, but it's a complete tossup as to whether or not it will function at all. If you don't need to boot from the drive, just turn off the ASMedia OPROM in the EFI setup and this will resolve many of the problems. It will even let you use an ATAPI device such as a DVD Drive, with the OPROM enabled this is not possible. The Caviar Black drives should probably be connected to the X79 PCH ports (one of the top 6) anyway

 

[oxford373]

according to your motherboard user manual (if you want to use hot-plug of the external sata ports ,you have to set the asmedia 1061 controllers item in the bios settings to enabled,if you want to use full function of the ASM1061 storage controller(ex.AHCI)we recommend that you set this item to (AHCI)and install ASM1061 controller driver from the mother support DVD )what you have to do
1)set ASM1061 to AHCI mode.
2)install ASM media drivers from support DVD.
3)install your HDD .
also sata3 won't make your HDDs faster at all ,the average read of WD 1TB black is 120mb\s ,and sata 2 isn't bottleneck for any HDD or SSD with average read less than 300mb\s which it's the maximum read/write speed for sata 2 but your SSD should be connected to sata3 ports,also even if you connected your optical drive and WD green HDD to sata3 ports both of them will work on sata2 mode because they don't support it.

 

[play107]

Thanks for the answers guys, I have a much better understanding of it all now, I now have both my WD HDD black and green on the sata 2 and the front esata and my ssd on the sata 3 ports

 

[play107]

Best answer selected by play107.

 

[hrodrigues73]

Pinhead, thanks for your reply, explained everything I needed .... I have a rampage IV extreme, and every time I plug a Seagate 2TB on ASM port the PC does not restart, and I have updated the the driver controller on ASM page, but nothing different than crash happens...now a question ... if that driver is really a tremendous shit, because Intel uses? price? chipset limitation? Thank you again!