02-28-2012, 03:12 AM
It seems that the original ASUS BIOS for this motherboard has a bug, that prevents usage of additional plug in SATA controllers. Here is what I ran into.
I plugged in a PCI-E SATA3 controller to expand my internal storage options, but I can't use it. The controller is based on ASMedia ASM1061 chip, but I doubt that this really matters. Any controller would probably cause the same problem. What happens is when there is any drive connected to the SATA3 controller, the internal Intel RAID controller is bypassed during POST. The BIOS on the Intel is not invoked, therefore all the drives connected to the on-board SATA connectors disappear from the bootable drives list in BIOS and the only drives available are those connected to the SATA3 controller. However, if the SATA3 controller is still plugged in to the motherboard, but no drive is connected to it, everything is normal. This is clearly a BIOS bug to me. I opened a formal ticket with ASUS support to fix the BIOS back in November, but so far there was no action.
I plugged in a PCI-E SATA3 controller to expand my internal storage options, but I can't use it. The controller is based on ASMedia ASM1061 chip, but I doubt that this really matters. Any controller would probably cause the same problem. What happens is when there is any drive connected to the SATA3 controller, the internal Intel RAID controller is bypassed during POST. The BIOS on the Intel is not invoked, therefore all the drives connected to the on-board SATA connectors disappear from the bootable drives list in BIOS and the only drives available are those connected to the SATA3 controller. However, if the SATA3 controller is still plugged in to the motherboard, but no drive is connected to it, everything is normal. This is clearly a BIOS bug to me. I opened a formal ticket with ASUS support to fix the BIOS back in November, but so far there was no action.