Empty Card Reader appears as four drives?

HoneycombAG said:

I suspect you don't have your drives connected in their right spots either. There's a difference between being connected on a 3.0 Gbps bus and a 6.0 Gbps bus, by looking at the image of it.

The board has two C602 native 6G SATAs & Marvell has four 6G. The rest are SATA-2 3Gb/s. There are no SATA-1.

HoneycombAG said:

You can't RAID if your drives are connected on a different-speed bus.
You also might want to take note, a drive may be certified for SATA-III but will plug into a SATA-II bus and still work, but runs slower. However, as with SATA-II drives, it will not work on a SATA-I bus unless you put something across a jumper block of some kind.
CD/DVD-ROM drives always operate at SATA-I speed. Bluray drives will require a SATA-II bus.

Fortunately, I know about mixing buses for RAID. I’ve used Hi-Point RAIDs before on diff system. All my production SSDs are 6Gb/s and are put on SATA-3 headers, even though none them can saturate a SATA-3 bus. My utility SSDs are on SATA-2s since speed doesn’t matter. And my opticals are on USB-3 ports because they are slow and seldom used except burning DVDs and BluRays.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

….. over at NewEgg and saw many similar complaints: faulty bios, unstable RAID, bad user's manual, doesn't always play well with other components, such as GPU cards. etc. Reading Those reviews before buying would have been more than enough to scare me away from that board.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

One thing that jumped out at me when I checked you System Specs: 128GB RAM. That's an awful lot of RAM (and I thought I went nuts with 32GB RAM)! The specs on the board at NewEgg also says the board only supports up to 64GB. I checked at ASUS' website and they also said the board supports only 64GB RAM (256GB registered memory—i.e. RDIMM—you don't list a part number for your RAM so I can't check it out). Even with heavy video editing , etc. I have trouble envisioning a need for 128GB of RAM. Have you tried cutting back to 64GB of RAM to see if stability has improved. Also, are you trying to overclock your CPUS and your RAM? Both can contribute to instability. In the case of RAM, overclocking can actually slow a machine down even if the benches look good (benchmarking is good for seeing if system performance has deteriorated over time bit; other than that, it's mostly only good for bragging rights). Very little benefit is gained running RAM much faster than 1600MHz.

Moving on to a different tack, what kind of a backup scheme are you using?

All these questions are making my brain heat up. Lol. I have 1600 RAM which is as high as the Xeon quads tolerate. And Honeycomb is correct: 4 dimms (64G) quads feed one xeon, and another 4 dimms feed the xeon - although the QPI allows both Xeons and mem banks to talk to each other. I don’t OC ram, I like stability. The Xeons are locked at 3.1, 3.8 turbo – no wiggle room there. 32 hyper-threads at 3.8Ghz is enough for me. Also when the 1600 RAM voltage is increased even slightly, the sticks fail, so no luck there. I just thought of something maybe easier in answering these questions.

Intel embedded their fan registers in an unconventional, unknown location – and I couldn’t monitor my fans speeds to tune my fans (xeon e5-2687Ws heat up lots). So I did some research and found the embedded register addresses and talked AIDA64 into writing a special patch for my board, which they did. To repay them for the favor, I designed my own custom sensor panel bezel for my system and made a video that ran a stress test on my Xeons with their monitoring software – too help promote their software, since they helped me with the patch they made for the fans.

So many of your questions will be answered by viewing this video of my board. The vid shows mem size, temps, efficiency, and compatibility. It shows to run fine. As I said before: it's the buggy drivers & old BIOS causing the problems. And you’ll see a picture of the cabinet. Then if you still have questions after the video, I’ll be happy to answer them. And about Newegg reviews, I read them but rather put most of my stock in the mobo reviews of professional reviewers like AnandTech, SSD Review, et al. Because I never know the tech competence of the Newegg reviewers; some may be having problems for reasons Honeycomb cited: wrong wires in the wrong holes, plugging USB-3 connectors into SATA-3 ports…. and complaining the wires are bad. Although some of their complaints are valid, since I have the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH9ole4ypTs

I suggest viewing 720 HD and go full screen to see all the numbers clearly.

There is nothing wrong with it mine used to show that way too

It happens when you use it ,It has to assign a Driver letter to work because technically it's a mini hard drive

Nice video mate, I enjoyed it, very stable system it seems. What is your reboot time? I'd like to see you participate in some https://www.sevenforums.com/benchmarks/ if time permits.

How are you posting? I use a dark forum theme due to poor eyesight and your post looks like this:

The issue I have with the pro reviews is they get only one product to test, usually cherry picked by the manufacturer. Also, products usually are tested for comparatively short times; many problems don't show up until after the product has been in use for a while. Rarely is more than one hardware configuration used for testing whereas actual users will have numerous configurations. One of the comments in the NewEgg reviews is that the board doesn't always play well with certain combinations. This isn't to say that pro reviews aren't useful but I don't like to depend on them only.

Granted, user reviews are heavily dependent on user competency but one can read "between the lines" to determine that. What is more significant is when the same complaint keeps cropping up.

Nice video, btw. What was the source of the music playing (I realize it was looped)?

I kind of suspect pro reviewers get some perks if a favorable review is made, aside from what Jeannie said about them being cherry picked. Many Newegg reviewers are noobs but as said, read between the lines.

I have posted some very negative reviews there and they published them so they don't filter bad ones out. I have found recently they will show the same set of reviews for similar products. It was with Samsung SSDs, they had the same set of reviews for all sizes and the Pro and EVO series.

Britton30 said:

...I have found recently they will show the same set of reviews for similar products. It was with Samsung SSDs, they had the same set of reviews for all sizes and the Pro and EVO series.

I've seen the same thing with WD HDDs. Annoying, isn't it?

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Britton30 said:

...I have found recently they will show the same set of reviews for similar products. It was with Samsung SSDs, they had the same set of reviews for all sizes and the Pro and EVO series.

I've seen the same thing with WD HDDs. Annoying, isn't it?

It's annoying especially when you know what quality product is i have never used anything but WD and Seagate ,I have bought an optional drive that was another brand for my dad because that is what he wanted

Just a couple a weeks ago i installed a back up Hitachi Drive my Dad gave me as well that is far as the brands i will go ,I might of had one Maxtor but that was way back in 94

Lady i would assume though most of the drives out now are comparable unless it's an SSD

Britton30 said:

Nice video mate, I enjoyed it, very stable system it seems. What is your reboot time? I'd like to see you participate in some Benchmarks - Windows 7 Help Forums if time permits. How are you posting?

Thanks. Though it may be stable in one sense — when there’s not things running that happen to address drivers that have bugs in them, then yes, it runs stable. But when multi-workloads run, strange little glitches arise. Or as mentioned earlier, when you have RAIDS, etc — or run AS-SSD (as you know) and little flags or error msgs appear like with the RAMdisk and AS-SSD showing alignment flag; when on the i7 rig nothing like that appears for RAM drive.

But what I call unstable in operation vs performance, is when it consistently boots fine as usual, then for no apparent reason, the next boot sets at black screen; then I press Restart button and it boots as usual and is fine on reboot for another five boots and then does it again. Lots of little things like this. BIOS seems unstable sometimes, then stable at other times -- so can you really consider that stable? It seems easier to live with the small glitches than hassle ASUS support on each and every issue. I would rather beleaguer you guys with my whining. Kidding!

Reboot and POSTing are terrible. I suspect part of the BIOS issues. POST recycles over & over 3-4 times as if looking for more devices — sometimes taking up to 30-40 seconds. (amazingly my ASUS ultra-lite Zenbook boots in 3 seconds). Also, I’m not so sure I’d be a candidate for the Benchmarks thread. Remember, the Z9PE-D8 WS board only out-shines the X79 boards during large multi-task, multi-thread-leveraging workloads. I liken it to a 60mph semi-truck carrying a massive load compared to a 200mph Ferrari with a small cargo area.

Mine is NOT a speed demon, locked at 3.8GHz; I’m no match for a 4.5G OC chip on an X79 board. I built mine to handle massive amounts of data rendering/transcoding for video/3Dmod while still having lots of headroom (cores & ram) for working on other functions simultaneously: text editing, Photoshop image editing, recording TV programs, AfterEffects, etc — all can be done at the same time without impacting each other. I can work on difference stages of three diff projects at the same time — very time efficient, if you don’t go nuts trying to keep track of everything at each stage.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

The issue I have with the pro reviews is they get only one product to test, usually cherry picked by the manufacturer. [True] Also, products usually are tested for comparatively short times; many problems don't show up until after the product has been in use for a while. [Totally agree] Rarely is more than one hardware configuration used for testing whereas actual users will have numerous configurations. One of the comments in the NewEgg reviews is that the board doesn't always play well with certain combinations. [Also my experience] This isn't to say that pro reviews aren't useful but I don't like to depend on them only.

Granted, user reviews are heavily dependent on user competency but one can read "between the lines" to determine that. What is more significant is when the same complaint keeps cropping up.
[How true! But remember, if you all buy the same product at about the same time, you don’t get the benefit of someone else’s long-term experience with the later arising faults]

Nice video, btw. [Thanks] What was the source of the music playing [On these "review vids" I use royalty-free stuff, so I don’t have to “Credit” the artist at ending; therefore I don’t bother keeping track of artist, title, or source. I usually rename the music file itself with a mood label rather than the title of song (ie: dramatic, documentary, classical, serene etc.) If I can find the source of this one, I can PM you if you want it.] (I realize it was looped)?

Britton30 said:

I kind of suspect pro reviewers get some perks if a favorable review is made, aside from what Jeannie said about them being cherry picked. Many Newegg reviewers are noobs but as said, read between the lines.

I have posted some very negative reviews there and they published them so they don't filter bad ones out. I have found recently they will show the same set of reviews for similar products. It was with Samsung SSDs, they had the same set of reviews for all sizes and the Pro and EVO series.

Okay… you guys got me on that one. I stand corrected, you’re right. Plus I forgot, the pro reviewers usually get free product to test so long as they don’t beat it up the product with bad reviews. I suppose I place too much credibility on reviewers simply because they are called “Pros.” And “J” is right, their testing is short-lived — many of my issues didn’t surface until much later. I probably unfairly judge some of the Newegg reviews (I buy there too) when occasionally I read an outlandishly poor review based mostly on the customer’s anger vs the defectiveness of the product. Although, I’ve had my share of upset episodes in the past over blatant product defects…. Maaaaybe even over motherboards….

I find they do the same at Amazon — same reviews for diff model SSDs, HDDs, and cameras. As you guys aptly point out…. We must be careful and read betw the lines. Great feedback and comments from you guys!! You offer good reminders about reality, so as to remember to use our good common sense.

Solarstarshines said:

It's annoying especially when you know what quality product is i have never used anything but WD and Seagate.... Lady i would assume though most of the drives out now are comparable unless it's an SSD

Like you, I think most of us buy a particular brand HDD for whatever reason, have good luck with it, then tend to favor it. I too have had good luck with Seagate HDDs.

Now I try to buy mostly SSDs for the speed and also for their solid state reliability. But because SSDs are still a bit expensive vs HDDs -- I usually pick the one's with the lower price tags, since they say the NAND technology and controllers are becoming so evolved now, that in mainline, consumer levels, that often the brand doesn't matter all that much. But if you're looking for pricey high-speeds, some brands do better than others.

If you can find the source of the music, I would be interested. Thanks!

Going back to RAM, my curiosity got the better of me and I posed the question on the ASUS forums. Here is the reply I got. Just FYI since we don't know the brand and part numbers of your RAM.