I have an ASUS P6X58D Premium motherboard with the Intel X58 chipset and the “Intel Desktop/Workstation/Server Express Chipset SATA RAID Controller”, which Belarc Advisor reports as an ICH10R controller. I have two Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA HDDs set up in a RAID 1 configuration on ports 0 & 1. I also have two internal SATA optical drives connected on ports 2 & 3. The two optical drives show up in the Intel RST Manager program as “non-member” drives and cause no problems on the Intel RAID controller.
However, when I bring an external SATA optical drive that’s connected to SATA RAID port 4 or 5 online, even if it’s powered on before the system, the Intel RST Manager program reports that it’s stopped working. If I try to run the RST Manager, it throws up a big long error message and still refuses to work. The system should not see any difference between an internal SATA ODD and an external SATA ODD in an eSATA enclosure. Intel RAID driver version originally was 13.1.0.1058, but was updated to 13.6.0.1002 in an attempt to solve the problem. The newer driver had no effect.
Is there a limit to the number of optical drives that can be connected to the Intel RAID controller and be recognized by the Intel RST Manager program?