SATA

I ran into some nasty problems when I tried to run the SATA ports in non-AHCI mode. I wasn't able to solve the problems or even reproduce them at will, however, AHCI mode works perfectly fine on all the onboard SATA controllers

The P5W DH Deluxe ships with the following SATA controllers:

• 3 ICH7 ports
• 2 Silicon Image 4723 (aka EZ-BACKUP) ports
• 2 Jmicron ports (one is external)

ICH7

The three Intel ICH7 SATA ports should work with any recent kernel just fine. I didn't have any problems with them when run in AHCI mode.

Silicon Image 4723 aka EZ-Backup

The Silicon Image 4723 is a real hardware RAID controller. I takes one of the four ICH7 SATA ports and lets you connect 2 HDDs to it which can be run in hardware RAID0 or RAID1.

The Silicon Image 4723 is the reason you only get 3 ICH7 ports since the 4th port is hard-wired to Sil =)

I succesfully ran RAID1 and RAID0 on this controller with a recent -mm kernel. While the RAID worked just fine, it was very slow. I ran some tests and was dearly disapointed. If you want to run a RAID0 or RAID1 use Linux SoftwareRaid but stay away from EZ-BAckup!.

If you remove both EZ jumpers you can use the right EZ-Backup port as the 4th ICH7 port.

Jmicron

The Jmicron controller offers one onboard SATA port and one eSATA port. I do not own any eSATA devices but the onboard port works just fine in AHCI mode.

Summary

If you want to use RAID, stay away from EZ-Backup since its performence is very bad. A Linux software RAID OTOH flies on every controller =) I am currently using the one internal Jmicron port, all 3 ICH7 ports and one EZ-Backup port (the 4th ICH7) in AHCI mode and they work perfectly fine.