MPG X670E Carbon RAID woes

o.orcinu158202db

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Aug 19, 2023
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I've finished setting up my somewhat overly complicated storage setup, and have some observations and questions.
First of all, an old issue and a possible solution...

As has been reported many times before, AMD RAID drivers and RAIDXpert2 are extremely buggy, and there's a bug with SATA RAID that has remained unfixed for approximately 4 years now. Traditional (spinning) HDDs that are NOT part of the array do not get recognized by RAIDXpert2 at logon time until you open RAIDXpert2 GUI and hit Rescan, at which point they just magically reappear as if nothing happened. Same thing occurs if you're patient enough to wait 1-5 minutes for some timeout to occur and trigger a RAID driver reinit and rescan.

Additionally, even with the drive showing up, occasionally, presumably after some power management event, they'll disappear again and produce more IO errors until another driver reinit, unless RAIDXpert2 GUI is running in the background all the time. There are many variations of this issue reported - sometimes it's traditional drives in a RAID array, sometimes "legacy" (i.e. not part of an array), hard drive brands differ from case to case, ports don't matter, cables don't matter... The commonality is that drive does not get properly initialized by RAIDXpert2, reappears as if nothing happened after a rescan, and most importantly, the drive itself and all the hardware components are okay.

I'm experiencing the same issue, and i think i finally found the permafix (knock on wood) based in part on previous solutions mentioned here and on other forums:
1) open Task Scheduler
2) create a FIRST task that starts RAIDXpert2, trigger at startup, run even if user not logged in, run at full privileges
3) create a SECOND task (this one's important), same settings as the first task, but have it run "rcadm.exe" from the RAIDXpert2 folder, with parameters -M -rsc
4) reboot and everything should work fine now, on first logon

What this does:
- runs RAIDXpert2 in background, as previously suggested by others
- runs the command line RAIDXpert2 interface, and tells it to rescan the arrays
- all of this happens before logon, so by the time you're logged in, all disks should be working and showing up

It's ridiculous that this is necessary, but it is what it is.
 
Now, onto the second part of the post.
I'm sure someone will chime in to say "BIOS RAID bad, don't use it".

I HAVE to use it if i want to boot Windows from an NVME RAID 0.
And before someone else chimes in to tell me that RAID 0 is bad and i'm gambling with my data - i don't care, i run backups of the system partitions that are on it, and i want to run it as a RAID 0 for performance reasons.

That said, i'd really like to NOT have to run the SATA disks under AMD RAID, and use Windows RAID / Storage Spaces instead.
This, however, seems impossible on X670E, or at least i can't figure out how to do it.
If i set SATA mode to AHCI, RAIDXpert2 disappears from BIOS completely, and NVME drives (not SATA) are now not managed by AMD RAID either.

It seems that on this chipset, and this board, it's all or nothing - either both NVME and SATA are RAID, or neither of them are.

If anyone can figure out how to get RAIDXpert2 going with SATA set to AHCI, please help, as that would be preferable to the mess from the first post.
 
Ok, i'll be that someone then if i must:
"BIOS RAID bad, don't use it"
"RAID 0 is bad and you're gambling with your data"

Ok, you cleared those up already. But i have a third one.
"RAID0 doesn't actually improve the performance nearly as much as you'd think"

RAID0.jpg


What are we looking at here?

Here's an MSI Z690 Tomahawk WiFi DDR4 with an i5-12600K, GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and 32 GB DDR4-RAM in Win11, with up to three Kingston KC3000 2TB in RAID0 @ 3x PCIe 4.0.

This has been tested with a test suite of seven current and popular games, some of them with lots of mods. The time for clicking in the launcher to the main menu was recorded, as well as the time from clicking "Load game" to the savegame having been launched, then it was all added up. As you can see, nothing improves.

The RAID0 perfectly scales up in purely theoretical benchmarks, from 7 to 14 to 21 GB/s read speeds for example, but none of that matters for the real-world performance in the gaming scenario. There might be workloads where it's beneficial, but gaming for one is not among those.

Now you can decide if RAID0 is worth the hassle, and if the answer is yes, i do apologize for not being able to help with your problem, and i hope that someone can help you with that later. I personally tend to stay away from RAID so this is a field i have limited experience with.
 
This has been tested with a test suite of seven current and popular games, some of them with lots of mods. The time for clicking in the launcher to the main menu was recorded, as well as the time from clicking "Load game" to the savegame having been launched, then it was all added up. As you can see, nothing improves.

I don't run games off it.
Games run off a normal, lone SSD.
The RAID 0 is reserved for system, VMs and database stuff.
 
You may need to look for the alternative.
Nowadays, soft raid is the way to go.
As you said, windows storage pool might be an option.
Also, you can try ZFS on Windows.
Or you can build your own NAS.
 
I've been running the first solution @o.orcinu158202db mentions since early this year and it works well enough without any hiccups for me. I've been running each of my SSDs as stand-alone volumes. I've not had the issue described where the arrays don't show up.

Also I've not had to do any of this on my ASUS x570 or MSI B650M WiFi, so I thought these issues are maybe specific to the x670e or x670.

I also have the UWP GUI version isntalled , and noticed it doesn't show the TRIM option for the SSDs. I really wish AMD would polish this turd.

RAIDXper2 with Trim Shown 2023-08-19 234512.jpg


RAIDXpert2 UWP no Trim Shown 2023-08-19 234700.jpg
 
You may need to look for the alternative.
Nowadays, soft raid is the way to go.
As you said, windows storage pool might be an option.
Also, you can try ZFS on Windows.
Or you can build your own NAS.

You've missed the bit where i've said that you seemingly cannot enable RAID for just the NVMe drives.
It's all or nothing - both NVMe *AND* SATA, or neither, at least on this board.

I cannot build a windows storage pool nor switch to ZFS unless i give up on BIOS RAID totally, including the NVMe drives.

I have two NAS machines already, that does not solve the immediate issue, however :)
 
I also have the UWP GUI version isntalled , and noticed it doesn't show the TRIM option for the SSDs. I really wish AMD would polish this turd.

Yeah, i noticed that too.
You can run TRIM manually from Windows' Optimize Drives though (and it should show that TRIM is being run regularly if everything's ok).
 
You've missed the bit where i've said that you seemingly cannot enable RAID for just the NVMe drives.
It's all or nothing - both NVMe *AND* SATA, or neither, at least on this board.
Should be able to do it I have my SATA in Raid but not NVME
Should just have to Select what drives you want to be in RAID
You may need to reboot to bios a couple of times for all Raid controllers to work though as you can see I'm Missing the SATA controller

I prefer BIOS raid it is easier and less hassle for me this Raid arry is now on its third Motherboard with no loss of data between swaps and is also the Main Reason I have the X670E Carbon Only MSI AM5 board that will do a six Drive sata raid

When fist set RAID Controller is missng

1692509601682.png


Afeter a couple of reboots back to BIOS all Correct
1692509759960.png


Oh and there is some strange cosmetic problem with BIOS showing your Drives in Raid
So you need to do all the checking in the actual RAID menu
1692509999210.png

1692510147693.png

1692510206473.png

1692510246935.png

o_0 :wall: o_0 :wall: o_0 :wall: o_0:wall:o_0:wall:
 
Last edited:
Hi,

Having issues with AMD Raidxpert on the X670E MSI Godlike. Took me a while to figure out how to create a raid array in bios. Turns out it will automatically select each m.2 nvme disk as its own raid array and you have to delete the ones you want to add to new array. So the problem is even after confirming in bios that I have created a raid 0 array when I boot into Windows each disk shows up as individual disks no matter what I do. Using the latest AMD Raid drivers for the X670E. MSI doesn't even have raid drivers on their support site. So going to have to use storage spaces if I can get that to work.

Garbage tech doesn't work.

Thanks
 
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