I had a board with both JMB322 and ICH10R controllers a few years ago and remember wondering the same thing. Apparently it's preferable to use the South Bridge controller for hard drives and the JMicron for optical drives or eSATA connectors. Also, the JMicron "Smart Backup" RAID software seems fairly crude compared to the equivalent Intel product.

The JMB363 can do FIS switching, so I use it for my external HDD enclosure. Software rather than fakeraid. Seems to work just fine, but my requirements are not massive.

Are the AMD Southbridge raid any better?

I'd say that newer revisions like the SB750 could probably do the same or perhaps slightly better, plus they support FIS switching. The SB600 on my NAS does not so I don't use it for eSATA.

Absolute throughput wasn't a big concern for my application, so I haven't done any extensive testing. I know the chipset works reliably and doesn't appear to have any great performance deficits.

Errius wrote:

I had a board with both JMB322 and ICH10R controllers a few years ago and remember wondering the same thing. Apparently it's preferable to use the South Bridge controller for hard drives and the JMicron for optical drives or eSATA connectors. Also, the JMicron "Smart Backup" RAID software seems fairly crude compared to the equivalent Intel product.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

For optical drives, you want to stay away from the JMB controllers (they're quirky with ATAPI devices), though they are reliable for hard drives.

If you *must* have an IDE optical drive and you have no IDE ports, the most inexpensive option is an Sil0680-based controller. You only need take care that your variant has a flashable ROM on it, as many of the cards still being sold have a permanent ROM on them, and you need a combination of the latest BIOS/Driver to get it to work reliably.

The only quirk so far I've had with the 0680 is booting off of DVDs. But if you have an ICH10R with exposed IDE ports, then by all means, use those ports for your optical drive(s).

The other option is to get a SATA optical drive that plugs into an ordinary SATA port.

There also exists IDE to SATA adapters, which plug transparently onto the IDE port on the back of the drive, and allow you to run a SATA cable to the motherboard. They require a floppy power connector (besides the connector that's attached to the optical drive). The only caveat I know of with these adapters is that they will always down-rate your drive to UltraDMA 2.

The only problem I noticed running 2 optical drives on the JMB was that the second drive is only detected in Windows (after loading the driver), so you can't boot from it. I don't know the reason for this since the first drive works without it.

Errius wrote:

The only problem I noticed running 2 optical drives on the JMB was that the second drive is only detected in Windows (after loading the driver), so you can't boot from it. I don't know the reason for this since the first drive works without it.

Try burning stuff with drives attached to the JMB if you're in the mood for some nice, shiny coasters 😀

I used to burn Blu-Rays with this setup and never had any problems.

BTW although my controller is JMB322, I'm actually using the JMB36X_WinDrv_R1.17.65_WHQL.zip drivers and Device Manager reports it as "JMicron JMB36X Controller"

Errius wrote:

I used to burn Blu-Rays with this setup and never had any problems.

BTW although my controller is JMB322, I'm actually using the JMB36X_WinDrv_R1.17.65_WHQL.zip drivers and Device Manager reports it as "JMicron JMB36X Controller"

Are you refering to a native SATA BD-RW drive? I'm refering to ATAPI drives on the JMB3xx IDE ports.

OK we're talking about different things then. I was thinking SATA. I've never run a PATA optical drive off the JMB.