Orom version not compatible with volumes greater than two terabytes on ICH9R

Hi there,

Hopefully my question is in the right (sub) forum. …

I have this nice old Asus P5K3 deluxe motherboard which I bought in 2008. Kept on upgrading it because I’m not a gamer, and my criterion is that as long as I can easily play most common formats of video (H264 compressed, uncompressed and what may come hereafter), there’s no need to upgrade.

So half a year ago I bought a nice Samsung 830 EVO SSD. This one just worked fine on my old OROM version 7.5, Intel ICH9R. Bios version was 1206 (from the asus site, AMI bios). A week ago I decided to change my 4 old Samsung 1TB discs (103SJ, UJ), because my RAID5 array was falling apart (no kidding, after 5 years…) The array was split up in two volumes of approximately 1.7TB. Replacement for the discs are 4 WD2003FZEX discs, the new issue, after the FAEX series, should have several performance improvements.

Because the machine crashed almost always when booting onto windows after having selected IDE or AHCI modus in the bios (to test the old discs separately), I decided it was time to upgrade the OROM. On the OCZ forum I found a bios 1207 specifically for my mobo, which upgraded the OROM to version 8.5. This went well, only the OROM was updated, but it showed ICH10R in the RAID manager. The All four discs were detected with their correct sizes (1.86TB).

Problem: I couldn’t create volumes greater than 2TB. I had not found anything about a two-TB limit on the Intel website. Instead I tried to create the volumes in the windows environment, in the RST manager (version 12.9.0.1001). I thought maybe I could create 3 volumes within the array of 1.86TB to stay under the limit: no-go, only two were allowed. Weird thing: although the RST-manager warned:

the orom version is not compatible with volumes greater than two terabytes

I could move the slider further than the 2TB point, up to 2,7 TB. Afterwards I initialized the volumes, enabled them in windows 7 disc manager and I was ready to go. HD tune shows nice speeds, all seems fine (although one volume had a strange pause of a few seconds before starting to test), but the pre-windows raid-manager shows volumes as ‘incompatible’.

Question is; should I do something about this? (custom OROM?)
-Is safety of my files guaranteed? If I can initialize the volume, does that mean it will correctly be error-checked and rebuilt if necessary?
-What happens after I fill the volumes up beyond the 2TB ‘border’?

This may all sound a bit naïve to the reader, which it probably is. I hadn’t counted on the 2TB ‘limit’, did my homework on beforehand, probably not thoroughly enough though.

Any help is much appreciated.

30-januari-2014_00-30.png

volume incompatible.jpg

@ Thias:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!

The message is correct. Only Intel RAID ROM modules from v10.5.x.xxxx up are able to support > 2 TB sized volumes.

If you want to create > 2 TB sized RAID volumes, I recommend to update the Intel RAID ROM of your BIOS to v10.5.x.x.xxxx or higher (preferable version: 11.2.0.1527).

Nothing is guaranteed, but the risks are not very high and the chance to get full support of your RAIDed HDDs is worth a try. You should do a backup of your important data and prepare an USB flash drive with the currently working BIOS to flash it, if the modded BIOS shouldn’t work.

Your system will not be able to read these data.

Regards
Fernando

Hi Fernando,

Many thanks for your swift reply. I understand, in order to be on the safe side, and to enjoy the full capacity of the volumes I need a custom bios. The volumes are still empty, so no backup needed there.

So, I’ll have to backup current bios, replace the 8.5 OROM version with the 11.2 one, using the guide that you wrote?

Yes.
Furthermore I recommend to secure erase the HDDs and to create a new RAID array by using the Intel RAID ROM v11.2.0.1527.

Hi Fernando,

OROM inserted in latest bios, flashed, and all works fine now. Volumes initializing.
Many thanks again!

OROM updated.jpg