Casting bread upon the waters - x99 e ws usb 3.1

Seems legit. GLHF.

TYVM Bit coin mining isn't worth the effort (or the expense) these days.

UPDATE I've since figured out how Corsair gets away with saying the the ram fans are "universal". A: Liquid Cooling.

Think I'm gonna pass. Where there's a will there's a way.

Now these are temps I can live with. (Did a little tweaking.) I'm still going to see if I can use the ram fans.

It's good to see I got those temps down. They were higher when I made this video.

Now hear this: You think I was a little over the edge on the floppy thing??? ASUS X99-E WS USB 3.1 USER GUIDE (E 10201) reads as follows: "The motherboard does not provide a floppy drive connector. You have to use a USB floppy disk drive when creating a SATA RAID driver disc" - Chapter 5-7 Creating a RAID driver disk. There is NO WAY around it . You must use a floppy drive in order to install RAID on this motherboard even though NO such component or header is provided! GREAT JOB, ASUS! Duh-uh!

actually there needs to be some cooling dedicated to chipset heatsink of this mobo. it cools two plx chips and chipset.and it can get 100c on a testbed with few gpus and no fan on it.asrock has similar board with two plx chips and they use a small fan on chipset + plx chips heatsink. I own older rev of this board,which was crap until few bios revisions .And had to rma first one I got.

That might explain why the first board died within 5 minutes on the test bench.

NEW CHAPTER

Trying to stick to this thread here in the hopes that it may be of some use to other ASUS X99-E WS users.

I have one of these: http://www.istarusa.com/en/anh/products.php?model=BPU-124V2-SS

Please forgive my nooblishness and suffer an old fool who never bothered to use SAS.

My question: Is it possible for me to have this unit full connected on all 8 ports and still safely use SATA while I hunt for good deals on SAS drives? The reason I'm asking is it will surely be a pain to have to pull the cage to rewire it after the build is complete. Originally I used it for RAID 10 on SATA via SSD on an LSI card.

SUGGESTIONS?

Guess I'll just leave the SAS part of it disconnected until I get some drives. And yes . . . The board in this unit does support SAS.

I had the same experience. I have the original, first batch, preordered x99-e ws. Loads of issues in the beginning, plus I had to RMA the first one.

@CHESSTUR I'm not sure exactly what you're asking- the only input I can offer is that not all my sata ports work at the same time. Maybe it's because of pcie lanes or m.2 or maybe one is just busted.

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Im sure someone knows more then me and can counter this statement if I am wrong.

But using m.2 causes you to use less of your sata ports. As it takes them away.

I have only read this and never experienced this, as i have no m.2.

X99 boards were notorious for RAM issues related to cold boot training and it took many BIOS revisions before the wrinkles were ironed out. Not every board was so badly affected but I had 3 X99 Gigabyte Gaming 5P boards before the last one has been 100% reliable ever since. The previous boards would just randomly die and it affected a good portion of the people that bought the same bundle as me.

It's been so good ever since I bought another one and that board with the same BIOS has been completly reliable. I then bought an MSI X99S SLI Pus X99 and that's OK but does very occasional suffer the cold boot bug.

As for SATA/PCI-E lane port sharing it's a common way to get round the chipset restriction. More commonly the M.2 slots share lanes with the SATA Express ports if fitted.

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That would line up with what I noticed about the bios on the latest board , that is the one that finally worked. I noticed I did not have to flash the bios on this last board as it already had the latest bios. So far all my sata seems to be working and I still have a good deal left over as well. It could well be that this is because not all the PCIe slots are full (yet). Sooner or later I'll find out, I'm sure. As much as I like i-star usa components the violet leds are a bit much. The blue leds turned violet when I configured the LSI card for RAID 10 and they really throw me. I have a test o.s. on it right now... never used before. Almost lost the o/s testing it to see if I really had RAID 10. This is an entirely unrelated issue which I may need to discuss with someone with knowledge comparable to that of Wendell's genius. First I want to see if I can solve the RAID 10 issue by myself as it has switched to APIC mode. (This is when my blue lights turned violet.) I mean they do flicker blue now and then which is an indicator that I have power but I thought the violet was supposed to indicate when the drives were being written to and for the most part the leds are a solid violet with the occasional blue flicker. Also the cards are being read by the o/s as being SAS when they are SATA. I'm hoping a driver update from LSI will fix this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoC7LJDhKAU

Ignore the tiny green led in the secondary raid cage it was only a test.

This is good to know. I'm toying around with the idea of M.2 but I'm thinking with 128 GB of RAM a Ram Drive might suffice. I rarely use E Sata these days so this is good information to keep in mind. :slight_smile:

I read this as

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You are more or less right. Since M.2 also carries a SATA signal most motherboards make the M.2 share lanes with a SATA port or two, meaning using either the SATA or M.2 will cause the other to not work. However, some motherboards do not share lanes and it's possible to use all SATA devices and M.2 at the same time.

Easiest way to tell is to simply check the storage specs of the specific motherboard.

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lol Am I dating myself? :grinning:

OK You convinced me. I have little doubt an M.2 will give me better read/write speeds than SSDs in RAID 0. With an independent RAID card I should still be able to keep my RAID 10 for speed and efficiency on other projects so I just ordered myself one of these because the price was right:

:slight_smile: Just ordered my first one.

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Derp I got confused and was thinking "sata express"

No, e sata isn't that old. I use FireWire 400 daily. xD

Silly naming schemes as usual. I did briefly own a couple of eSATA enabled external caddies but always found USB 2.0 more universally compatible. Good thing they had dual interfaces.

I've yet to see an actual SATAe device in the wild.

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Now I must confess that FireWire was before my time. That is, before I managed to use it Firewire was still being used but I was just learning how to build PCs at that pit. Here's a progress report (sort of) Camera cut out on first video and I had to go to the city so when I returned I followed up with a short clip today.

I found a possible solution to the problem but by the time I discovered it I had already converted two of the SSDs into RAID 0 via Intel and ordered two Kingston SSD's of the same volume which do not use sandforce drivers. I have it working again and I'm now attempting to write a system image from RAID 10 via LSI to another drive in RAID 1 via Intel on board. :wink: It's an experiment.