X79-UP4 + SAS drivers (15k+ rpm)

[rharrison]

Hi,

I wonder if anyone knows or has already tried if this motherboard supports SAS drives, seeing as how similar it is to it's kin the UP5- server based board, with a C600 chip itself?

Maybe this is only disabled, or can be added by modifying the bios?

Thanks,

Rich

[xplode]

Re: X79-UP4 + SAS drivers (15k+ rpm)

As far as i know C600 chipset does not provide SAS support. C606 which is found on x79-up5 provides it. But also i found this:

So in short then, the X79 chipset supports SAS but Intel decided to remove it at a software level and instead made it an exclusive feature of the more expensive C606/608 server orientated chipsets. With ECS appearing to be the only motherboard manufacturer ballsy enough to re-enable SAS support, no other X79 board would feature more than six SATA ports without a third party controller.

That was until Gigabyte decided to take a different approach by adopting the C606 chipset in favor of the X79, creating the first certified LGA2011 motherboard to include the C606 chipset at X79 pricing.

Source
ECS claim to have enabled SAS on one of their motherboards, and I asked myself how is this possible, then i found this diagram for C600 chipset on intel site:

Source

Which clearly show that C600 chipset have 4 SAS enabled ports. Which means that if there is only software based lock and it is removed every x79 board can enable SAS. But i think manifacturers disable it in hardware in most cases.