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Zerg Mans
Oct 19, 2006

Problem description: I'm running into an issue with the Intel Rapid Storage technology on an Asus TUF Mark 2 Z270 motherboard, and suspect that either something on the board itself is bad, or I'm trying to do something that isn't possible.

I'm running 2x Samsung 960 EVO's in the M.2 slots on the board, and have them in raid-0, as a boot drive. This is working perfectly fine. However, I purchased 4 additional 2 TB Hitachi white label drives (yeah I cheaped out) that I wanted to build a storage array out of. Every time I try to set up a raid5 or raid10 array, the array degrades before it even finishes initializing, and a drive randomly disappears from being recognized by the controller.

Also CSM is disabled since I'm booting from the m.2 drives with them in PCI-E mode.

Attempted fixes: I have checked all 4 drives individually outside of raid with Hitachi's diagnostic program and HDtune, and they all check out. I have also attempted to rearrange which hard drive is connected in to which port, to see if the drive failure leading to degradation is associated to a single drive, and it isn't. I've also tried using Windows 10's software raid (Storage Spaces) to bypass the hardware controller entirely, and I run into the same issue. I have contacted Asus directly and they're trying to tell me that the hardware controller can't handle two different arrays, but that doesn't sound right because I've had two different arrays on a controller before many years ago, and also that doesn't explain the Storage Spaces raid failing.

What I suspect is that this board is advertised as allowing full connectivity to all SATA ports even if you're using both M.2 slots, but the reality of the situation might not reflect that.

The easy solution is just to buy a raid5 card and use that for my storage array, but I paid for these features and I want to see if I can get these features before spending more money.

Recent changes: This is a fresh build.

--

Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit home edition

System specs:
i7-7700k
Asus Tuf Mark 2 Z270
2x GTX 980
16GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4 2800
2x Samsung 960 Evo
4x Hitachi 2TB white label

Location: USA

I have Googled and read the FAQ: Yes

Zerg Mans fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Feb 2, 2017

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CaptainSarcastic
Jul 6, 2013



Is there a compelling reason you are running the EVOs in a RAID 0? With the native speeds of those SSDs it seems that for most purposes having them handled as discrete drives would serve just fine in most use-cases.

I'd suggest seeing what the behavior is if you do an install using one SSD as boot drive, one for extra space, and the only RAID being for the HDDs.

Zerg Mans
Oct 19, 2006

CaptainSarcastic posted:

Is there a compelling reason you are running the EVOs in a RAID 0? With the native speeds of those SSDs it seems that for most purposes having them handled as discrete drives would serve just fine in most use-cases.

I'd suggest seeing what the behavior is if you do an install using one SSD as boot drive, one for extra space, and the only RAID being for the HDDs.

In retrospect I should have just gone for a single 1TB evo drive. Splitting them up would be annoying to try to organize half my games and stuff on one drive vs the other - my dream was to have a super-fast 1TB boot/game drive, and 6TB of media storage. I've tried every possible combination of hard drives and ports (including trying a 3-drive array instead of 4), and I keep getting the same issue. I think Asus might be right, and I'll just have to spring for a secondary raid card.

Zerg Mans
Oct 19, 2006

I decided to just buy an LSI card off of ebay after noticing how ridiculously cheap decent, still-in-production cards are on there

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