BIOS of W860CU and W870CU

I really wonder whether the BIOS of W860CU and W870CU is the same. because I installed a second HDD by a DVD-slot bay on my W860CU, and I found no raid option in CMOS.

I compared the BIOS files of both, and it shows only a little difference between them. And in self-testing screen, it shows W8xCU BIOS xxxx, so I think it's possible to use W870's BIOS instead of W860's.

Does anyone have experience on this?
And suggest Clevo unlock RAID of W860CU in next BIOS release.

 

Clevo won't enable it in the 860 because RAID is a major selling point of the 870.

I think I read somewhere that the motherboard is the same in both, so maybe. But the bios are probably locked to the 870 and you are living really dangerously if you force a flash.

 

Really bad news. I heard someone's W860CU is always shown as W870CU in diagnostics softwares, so I guess it may be flashed with a W870CU bios mistakenly.

 

chemman26: where did you get the hd tray from ?
I see that Eorocomm sells such things, but I find the 100 USD s&h fee to Europe rather outrageous. Is there a better place to get the second hd tray from ?

---

BTW I'm considering to test the W870 BIOS, despite the kind warning of Mike570U.
Still, the Intel RAID setup in BIOS may add very little. For Windows systems, their internal soft solution is OK, and Linux is definitely capable with mdadm and lvm

//

 

Definitely the case. Don't worry about "BIOS raid" as it really doesn't get you anything. The only time it would really help is if you had multiple drives and used RAID5 or something like that to offload checksum operations from the CPU. Given that your CPU is in the 860CU, though, you probably wouldn't really notice it anyway.
See this Software vs Hardware RAID page for a more in-depth discussion.

 

A very simple, generic sata to sata tray, looks like this:



It should be easy to get. It's important to the confirm the tray parameters
1. SATA to SATA
2. 12.7mm height

 

I am trying to do the same thing. Do you have any results on your venture ? Were you able to flash the bios from W870 ?

Please let me know since I wish to do so too.

Cheers

 

the W870CU bios can be used in the W860CU.

it is detailed on other posts.

i currently run the mysin 1.12 for W870CU on my W860CU. it is the most stable one i found

 

Yes, the BIOS thing has is all over the place, that is why I abandoned this thread.

A have since then purchased a caddy and it words just nicely. I have still to mod the miniPCIe, sound, add an SSD and maybe one more as a mini-SATA device, add an internal IR solution and remove the useless touch buttons. But these are projects just to do something with hardware, not just play around in games

 

I have been googling and nbreview searching for quite a while now..

Can anybody please link me where I can find the latest MySN bios for W860CU /W870CU. I want to disable HT and try overclocking and try out RAID 0

Is the BIOS link here the best option

Thanks

 

I have done both and the best place to get the tray is on Ebay. I got mine for $20. Check this post for details.

I also got an external caddy for my removed DVD\CD drive and I use that as a slim portable device if I ever need to use a CD.