Hello,

 

I have an 8400 (with the Intel ICH6R RAID chip on-board).   I had a hard disk crach recently (first time ever!!) and so I decided this time around to go with RAID 1 so I will never have to deal with re-loading everything again.

 

I installed the 2 new Seagate 250GB SATA disks, no problem.  In the A06 BIOS on the system I configured the pair of drives as a Raid-1 set, no problem.

 

Just to be current. I downloaded the latest Intel Application Accelerator files for the 925X chipset from Intel.  At that time, the drivers were version 5.0.   (They are actually now referring to this as the Intel Matrix Storage driver -- changed the name from IAA).   I created a floppy with the driver on it so I could use the F6 method to load the RAID driver at Windows installation.

 

What I found was, when installing Windows XP Pro, the 5.0 driver would not allow the disk to be formatted.  It would format all the way through, and at the very end pop a message saying "Unable to format disk."

 

I beat my head against the wall for a day or so, and finally decided to drop back to the IAA 4.7 driver instead.    VOILA!   Format completed normally.

 

So...  I am concerned.   There is now a 5.1 version of the Matrix driver, and I would like to stay current for performance and data protection reasons (the version log inidicates that a number of bugs have been fixed since version 4.7).   I am extremely hesitant to update the driver however becuase of that very strange "unable to format" message, even though everything seemed to work fine.

 

Oh - I should note that before my mard disk crash (weeks before), I had updated the 8400 to run the 5.0 version of the driver.  It appeared to work jjust fine.  Of course I never had to format the hard disk with it until after this incident.

 

Does anyone have any experience with the later Intel drivers from their site, in conjunction with a large RAID 1 array?