Asus m5a97 RAID10 and a single SSD

boostdemon

boostdemon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 12, 2004
Messages
147
I'm having a terrible time getting this setup to work. I'm using an Asus m5a97 R2.0 board with 4x 1TB WD Red drives for storage and 1 Kingston HyperX 120gig SSD for Win7 64 Home Premium. The thought is to have the SSD by itself for the OS and the 4 1TB drives in a RAID10 configuration totaling 2TB of semi redundant data storage thats still fast enough to do photo/video editing. So far i have not been able to get windows to even begin installing.

Drive setup:
Theres 6 ports on the board, i have them setup in a CFI Case with a hot-swap drive array. Ports 1-4 are on one controller and 5-6 are on another.
Controller 1-4 : 1TB WD Red drives
Controller 5-6 : HP BR Optical in #5, Kingston 120gb SSD #6

Mobo setup:
I've gone into the southbridge config and set the SATA controllers to RAID mode using the Legacy ROM option (i havent figured out how to setup RAID with the UEFI mode). I have left it with RAID for both controllers since switching 1-4 to RAID leaves only RAID and IDE as options for 5-6.

*I have tried in IDE for 5-6 as well with no luck
*I have tried with another 1TB WD Black drive instead of the SSD and also failed

Here's what happens:
  1. Set both controllers to RAID mode in the SB Config
  2. configured the 4 1TB drives as RAID10 in the Legacy ROM
  3. Boot from win7 64bit Home Premium DVD and load Asus RAID driver: ahcix64s.inf
  4. Select Custom Install and chose Disc6 (SSD) and chose "New" (creates partitions) Hit next...
  5. Win7 install starts and fails with the following error:
    Windows could not format a partition on Disc6. The error occured while prepairing the partition selected for installation. Error code: 0x80070057
    Click to expand...
    to which i throw something and go back to the "install now" screen at the beginning
  6. Then when i try to start back over it errors saying:
    The drive is not ready for use: It's door may be open. Please check drive \Device\Harddrive6\DR6
    Click to expand...
    to which i hit continue exactly 12 times to the error before it comes up... uh. ok.
  7. try to delete the partition to start over since it shat the bed and i get:
    Failed to delete the selected partition. Error 0x80070015
    Click to expand...

So i switched the controllers back to default AHCI mode and boot from CD, deleted all the partitions i could find so it was unallocated space with no prior OS data. Rebooted and switched back to RAID, lost a drive in the array during this process and started that over. Installed again and got the following error:
Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computers hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computers bios menu.
Click to expand...

*sigh*

So, what am i missing?

It's been a while since i've built a PC (for reasons exactly like this) and I have no experience with using RAID and a single drive together, no clue what UEFI is other than its how you get win7 to use a 2+TB drive as the boot drive (shouldn't be an issue for me)... I'm totally expecting someone to see this and say "Duh moron, you cant do ___ with ___."
 
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Hardware details:
Case: CFI CFI-A7007 (link)
Motherboard: Asus m5a97 r2.0 (link)
PSU: Rosewill HIVE-650W (link)
Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1045T 2.7 GHz 6‑core (link)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB DDR5 OC edition (link)
RAM: 4x2GB (8GB total) DDR3 1333 PC310600
Harddrive: 4x 1TB Western Digital Red (link)
Harddrive: Kingston HyperX 3K 120gb (link)
Optical: HP Bluray/DVD-RW drive
 
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so in doing some further reading, it appears as through the RAID option in the bios even for the non-raid drives (SSD and Optical) include the AHCI drivers and should (in theory) work normally when all are set to RAID.

Someone suggested from a thread on (overclockers back in mid 2012) removing all drives except the primary OS single drive (the SSD) and DVD drive... then setting the bios to RAID with no LD array configured and try installing. Then (assuming it works) do all the windows updates, service packs and additional drivers... then go back and install all the drives for the RAID, configure it, boot up into windows and then you have all your drives in place.

I'm going to try that tonight as well as try a spare HDD as the OS drive instead of the SSD (even though the SSD is brand new and i've already had it running with win7 64bit in non-RAID AHCI mode)
 
**** update - Semi success!

well i got it to install with the SSD and all 6 ports set to RAID. I unplugged everything but keyboard/mouse, the SSD and the dvd. It would lock up at 11% during the "expanding windows..." option. I tried with a bunch of different SATA cables with no luck. Eventually i moved the SSD and DVD to SATA ports 1 and 3. Booted up the install dvd and deleted the partitions, created "new", and the install was successful. It's likely that either A. the RAID controller for ports 5-6 doesnt work well or B. i have a bad DVD drive or C. i have a flakey ISO of the win7 64 home premium image.

Next up, running all updates/drivers etc then moving it back to ports 5-6 and see if it boots. if it does, everything will get reconnected and the RAID10 LD array built... if that all works, gotta find the SSD optimization instructions and run some benchmarks.

**looks like if nothing else, im documenting this for anyone else on the web running into the same issues.
 
**** Update - Solved!

Ok so after installing all the updates from windows, drivers, office and basic software I shut it down and moved just the SSD back to controller 5-6. I opted for port 5 this time as port 6 interferes with the video card and presses against the sata cable connector (poor layout design on Asus's part).

With the SSD in port 5, computer booted up, "installed" device and rebooted on its own. Came back up and locked up explorer, restarted again by itself. Came back and seemed ok, tried installing itunes and opera, locked up and restarted yet again. So...

I moved the SSD to port 6. Runs perfectly stable. So im to believe that port 5 is unstable and the board needs to be RMA'ed. This previously had the DVD drive connected to it which would explain the locking up during install but not when it was running with a previously installed OS (not needing the optical drive for anything). Hope this helps someone in the future.

Results, bad port #5 on motherboard
 
Looks like #6 (same controller) is mildly flaky too... had to move back to port 1 with the SSD. Submitted for an RMA, we'll see how it works when the new one shows up.
 
I've got the Asus M5A97 R2.0 board on a brand new build...3 weeks old. I bought a Samsung 840 120Gb SSD drive, and I've been having NOTHING but problems also. The first drive I had would not initialize. After messing with it for hours, I finally got it initialized, but it then would not format. It would error out every time before the format completed. 5 minutes on the phone with Samsung tech support, and they told me the drive is bad.

Ran back out to MicroCenter and exchanged it for another one. Got it installed in port 6, and my write speeds are so slow that they stall out the computer...I'm getting 3-7 Mb/s writing to the SSD. I tried a different cable, port 5, and port 2...the speeds only got worse. I'm running a WD Raptor boot drive, Seagate 250GB, and WD Black 640GB storage drives. I've also got 2 DVD burners....everything is SATA and everything is set to AHCI in the bios. Every driver is up to date..Another 1 hour on the phone with Samsung tech...they want me to send them the drive. If they find that it is "fine", then they will only send me the same drive back. I'm returning this one again to MicroCenter, and I'm going to pick up a WD 1TB Black drive instead...far less headaches. I don't know if MicroCenter has a bad batch of Samsung SSDs, or if they just refuse to play nice with this motherboard, but I've spent enough time messing with it!
 
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I'm starting to think this motherboard does not do something correctly with SSD's in general but especially on ports 5-6 and using RAID/AHCI. It seems to me like the drive is going to sleep... If i reseat the sata cable on the drive when its not showing up it seems to come back.
 
My first Samsung 840 SSD was installed on port 5. It would not initialize. I finally got it initialized and it would not format. It kept erroring out. Samsung told me to return it. My replacement was tried on port 5, 3, and 2. It didn't matter which port it was on, the write speeds were absolutely atrocious. It was so slow that it bogged down the entire system. Samsung tech had no idea what was going on. I even removed the drive, and used a Sata/IDE to USB conversion cable to hook the drive up externally via USB. My write speeds went up to 28-35Mb/s, but still WAY under rated specs. All of my SATA ports are set to AHCI, and I am NOT running any RAID arrays. With the second SSD, I could not "secure erase" the drive using Samsung Magician. It kept telling me that the drive was frozen. I tried putting the machine to sleep and waking it up (with the drive plugged in), I tried hot swapping the power multiple times, no matter what I tried, the drive would not come out of the "frozen" state.

From what I've found, Samsung SSD's have issues with Marvell sata controllers. As far as I can tell, this MOBO uses an ASMedia controller...so no idea what is going on there?

I returned the second SSD today to MicroCenter, and I picked up a 2TB Seagate Barracuda.
 
Update: Solved for real now.

I ended up calling Asus support and worked with a tech for a bit testing some things and trying to get the board to work right. We couldn't figure out what was going on so i opted to try their flagship board the Sabertooth 990FX. It boasts a better RAID controller setup and 2 more ports which will give me the expandability in the future for a striped SSD primary drive if i want. Still having issues with the drives dropping out of the array and it shutting down. I started pulling drives that were failing and swapping position with another slot. Found that it was always starting with a particular serial number so i pulled that drive out. Then found that another drive was dropping as well... pulled that too. seemed to work with the 2 remaining drives for a month or so.

So after all said and done, i found that 2 of the 4 Western Digital RED drives had bad sectors that couldn't be repaired. I found them by going into the AMD RAIDxpert tool and looking at the "BSL" (bad sector logs). Every time the system would try to write to the drives it would crash or the drive would be dropped from the array. I ended up RMA'ing both drives and everything works flawlessly now. I cant imagine that this whole thing was due to drives but it was definitely the final piece of the puzzle.

Everything has been running rock solid for a month or so now using the Sabertooth 990fx and the two new drives.
 
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