[vinister]

So I've been battling this board for a little while now, trying to get a stable home server setup.

I have 2 x WD 2TB Hard drives, and an SSD for boot.

I am trying to put both 2TB hard drives on the Jmicron controller. I will hopefully add more if it ever gets stable.

The problem is that it takes lots of messing around to get more than 1 HDD to be recognized on the jmicron controller. I figured out the trick, basically you have to install the drivers, reboot, then hot-plug the drive in, and reboot again. It works about 1/2 the time. Sometimes you boot up and it won't see either drives.

After a couple of days, and a couple of reboots, the second hard drive will just drop out. Looking in the Jmicron hardware raid manager (in windows), the hard drive still shows up, and says 'unreleased'. No errors, everything is fine, but it just doesn't show up in windows. The windows disk management utility does not see it.

After being like this for a little while (hard drive dropping in and out every few days - very frustrating), the hard drive starting showing SMART errors. Eventually it died, and the jmicron utility showed me the errors.

So I thought it was just a bad drive the whole time. I RMA'd the drive through WD (a wonderful experience btw, I had a new drive in my hands in 4 days).

I put in the new drive, everything was working fine. Still had to do the hot-plug trick to get it going. But low and behold, 2 days later, I come home and there is only 1 HDD showing in windows, while both still show in the Jmicron utility.

WTF is happening here? Why would windows just drop the drive, but it still shows up fine in the utility? Doesn't make sense to me...

So for now I just need to have one of them in the built-in SATA port, and one in the jmicron port. But this means I am limited to these 2 hard drives, and if I want to expand, I am likely to have the same issues.

What now?

[vinister]

Still having the same issues.

Would be nice to get some sort of support!

[Daros]

Also got this problem.

Got in the Jmicron a raid5 array, on a reboot not al disks are found. Needs a couple of reboots to get all the drives to work together for a mount.

[vinister]

Daros, on 03 May 2011 - 01:36 PM, said:

Also got this problem.

Got in the Jmicron a raid5 array, on a reboot not al disks are found. Needs a couple of reboots to get all the drives to work together for a mount.

My problem just keeps getting worse.

I built this board into a new WHS box. I thought it should just work fine with only 1 hard drive being used in the jmicron ports, and I would do with 4TB total until something better came along. I really like the mini-dtx form factor, and got the Array R2 case which fits the board perfectly.

On the first day everything was great. Streamed a couple movies from the box, no problems. Then the 2nd day, tried to watch a movie, and it would only go 10 minutes before crashing.

Sure enough, I started getting tons of "IO DEVICE ERROR" reports in the WHS server manager. Then today, the drive disappeared and all my shares are lost. The server is totally unstable when this happens, I suppose because all my other computers are hitting it for shares that don't exist.

I took the "bad" hard drive out, put it in an external case, and all the data is there, and everything is fine.

Its just this board. The SATA implementation is terrible, buggy, and just broken.

Now what the heck do we do? IF I warranty it, will the replacement be any better? Will it be a gargantuan waste of my time? If my time is worth $20/hour, this board has cost me several hundreds already.

ARGH zotac... I wanted your product to work so badly, I was such a fan.

If Zotac could just simply reply here and help us out, I would be so much less angry.

[supaahiro]

I would suggest to open a support ticket.