PCI Express RAID Card Jumper Settings

[ckeech]

Hi,

I recently bought a generic PCI Express RAID card that has 2 eSATA ports and 2 SATA ports. I have no interest in setting up a RAID but purchased the card to add more hard drives to my computer. When I received the card it didn't come with any instructions, just a driver CD. After correctly installing the drivers the card was appearing in device manager as well as showing up in BIOS.

After trying to install drives I realised there were jumpers on the card. From what I can tell all they do is allow you to turn on and off certain SATA ports. There is a diagram printed on the circuit board that appears to tell you what jumper setting does what but I can't seem to make sense of it. The language barrier between me and the person from eBay is also preventing communication with them.

Basically what I want to do is enable all the ports on the RAID card. Both eSATA and both SATA.

Here is the board info:


Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Cameron

[Steve R Jones]

Did you hook drives up to the ports to confirm they are turned off?

[ckeech]

Yes. I checked each port by moving hard drives into the other ports. You can tell when the port is on becuase if you have a hard drive hooked up to it and you restart the RAID card will tell you what hard drives are connected in BIOS. When they don't show up I can only assume the jumpers are set incorrectly becuase when I randomly move the jumper settings a port which was off before then becomes on.

[Peter M]

These jumpers look like they're physically directing the signals either to the internal or external jack.

You'll have to move an entire set of (four) jumpers for a working solution.

Overall, this card looks like it's using a 2-port host controller, and lets you choose for each of these whether it's internal or external.

What's the main chip on the card? (Remove the sticker to see, or post the "Hardware ID" from Device Manager, Details tab.)

[ckeech]

Silicon Image SIL3132 SoftRAID 5 Controller. I got that from device manager. Is that the hardware ID that you are talking about? The thing that confuses me is it looks like the picture printed on the circuit board is telling you what the jumper settings do. I just can't understand it.

[Peter M]

Yes. That's a two-channel host controller chip.

What the print on the board says isn't as hard as you think. It's a table of "If you want connector CONy active, place jumpers Jx to a certain position".

Ex. if you want CON2 active, put the four jumpers J5-8 into the 1-2 position.

You'll figure that CON2/4 and CON1/3 are mutually exclusive, not really a surprise given that the host controller chip has no more than two channels.

[ckeech]

I think this is how I initially interpreted the table. Does the fact that it is only 2 channel limit the card to only supporting a maximum of two hard drives?

If that is correct that would explain why I couldn't understand the table. I failed to see a combination that would enable all four ports, assuming that I could in fact enable 4 ports.

[Peter M]

We've already worked out that it's quite obviously limited to two at a time, haven't we?

[ckeech]

Oh dear! I just assumed that you could run two hard drives of each channel. Oh well, thank you for your help anyway. It seems I didn't actually have a problem in the first place.

[bugsy_pal]

Thanks to y'alll! And thanks for the closeup photo. I too had the problem - got the card for $5 off ebay but couldn't get a drive connected to one of the e-Sata ports to show up in the bios. I completely missed the jumpers at first, and the lack of documentation didn't help. I will try it out.