I have posted this question to three different forums without one answer so I will try this one. There has to be someone out there who understands the HighPoint Controllers.

HighPoint or Abit hasn't responded to this question which is a simple one for them so it just shows that when you buy something do not expect support from the manufacturer. As a matter of fact I have two Abit BX133 RAID motherboards, a Abit BX6-2 motherboard also, and Abit has never answered a e-mail. I thought HighPoint was more responsible, but they don't answer e-mails either.

So, to the question. I had two hard disks installed on my BX133RAID that were a ATA66 7200 rpm drive and a ATA100 5400 rpm drive. These were just installed with the standard IDE 1 and IDE 2 connectors with the 40 pin ribbon cable. Since I hadn't tried the HighPoint HPT370 onboard controller I thought I would check it out. I set the bios to boot up off of the ATA100 Highpoint controller and connected the hard drives to the IDE 3 and IDE 4 connectors of the HPT370. One hard drive was on the Primary Master, the other on the Secondary Master, with the 80 conductor ribbon cables installed on the drives. OK, I restarted the computer and hit the CTRL H to bring up the HighPoint settings and the drives were correctly recognized and set at UDMA 4 and UDMA 5 which was right. I went to Win98SE and in windows installed the HPT370 drivers and utility, however, the HighPoint controller does not come up on a restart under the SCSI in device manager as it is supposed to. So, windows is not recognizing the HighPoint controller and the utility shows no drives are connected to the Primary and Secondary of the HPT which of course is where I have the drives connected. This leads me to believe you have to have a RAID Array set up which is a problem since you lose all the data on the hard drives and I would have to re-install the software. I am aware of the advantages of RAID but confused as to why the HighPoint Controller isn't recognized in Win98 when the hard drives are installed on the HPT connectors ?? I ran some performance tests and the drives definitely are a subpar data rate and not running at the ATA66 and ATA100 as are shown they are in the motherboard bios.

Any help appreciated on this. I am sure many people don't particularly want a RAID setup but want the ATA rate the drive is rated at. The standard IDE connectors on the motherboard are for ATA33 only so the performance of these drives isn't being met at all.

Dennis