HighPoint SATA III Host / RAID Controller Card Problems

[Digitalist]

So I have had a HighPoint 644 SATA III 6.0 GB host card in my system for some time now, and yes, it was a total pain to set up when I initially installed it. I recently picked up a new 3TB SATA III 6.0 GB drive (newegg had uhm on sale) and I had a spare HighPoint 620 SATA III Host / RAID Controller card laying around (and a spare PCI-E slot to boot) so I dropped the card in, mounted the drive, and wired it up, using a SATA III 6.0 GB cable, of course.

I then tried to boot it up - <insert /facepalm here> - yea, I got nothing.

Has anyone else successfully gotten a HighPoint 644 and a 620 to co-exist on the same board? (It'd be even more ideal if said board was a Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P.)

I've noticed that during boot up the system is seeing the newly installed card before the primary card, since the bootable disk is already on the primary card, the next step will be to switch the ports that the cards are installed in and see if that makes any difference. There's nothing in the board docs about one PCI-E slot being initialized before the other, but it's worth investigating. Will post follow ups (especially since I have read that HighPoint support is non-existent).


Using the onboard ports so that I can still use the new drive, but sure would be nice if I could take advantage of those fast I/O rates that come with SATA III.

 

[essenbe]

I have one but have not used it yet. I read in reviews on Newegg that you install it with nothing connected then startup and see if windows recognizes it and installs the drivers or go through the finding new hardware part. After it is recognized and installs drivers, then shutdown and install the hard drives to it. Guess we'll have to see if that works. If it needs drivers, I believe they are the Marvell 91xx drivers.

 

[iieeann]

This is off topic, but would you mind sharing how long does 644 take to initialize itself card and detect the hardisk?

This to me is very important because the time it takes for startup affect the overall system startup time. None, zero, review in this world mention anything about raid controller initializing and detecting time. I know this varies on individual setup, but at least mention somewhere in the setup for review.

I would like to use raid controller, but i am very sicked of the >1 min startup time of the raid card alone everytime PC is switched on. Had been using Adaptec 31205 before.

Thank you.

 

[essenbe]

I have read reviews that the high point rocket raid with the Marvell 9128 controller adds an extra 5 seconds to startup. But, those are the really cheap versions.