ASUS rampage ii raid issue

[Guest]

Hi,

Has anyone used the RAID 5 on the Rampage II GENE MB with success?

I have two different MB, different cables, different drives it seems that after 8 hours or less on both motherboards PORT 1 drops a drive with an error message and puts the array into degraded mode.

I have tested the drives separately and they seem fine. I have also put the same drive back in the array and had it rebuild successfully (takes a while) but again after less than a day PORT 1 drive has en error message. I have put in brand new drives and the same result ... eventually PORT 1 gives "AN ERROR HAS OCCURRED"

I don't think its a coincidence that both motherboards I have with totally separate hardware drop the same port.

The Drives are (6) Hitachi EA 320GB 2.5"
460W PSU
i7 920
4GB RAM (4x 1GB sticks)
OS is XP32

Any help is greatly appreciated.

totally frustrated

 

[r_manic]

I would recommend that you create a RAID array using a dedicated controller card. Not only will it simplify the setup process, you'll also be able to achieve better maximum speeds.

 

[fett]

Has anyone used the RAID 5 on the Rampage II GENE MB with success?
/quote]

I've been struggling with a Rampage II GENE MB for a while now.

I set it up with 2x 500MB drive and tried to configure them as mirrors.

Just as you say, one regularly drops and has to rebuild. Also occasionally it manages to lose the boot sector for the device. I've had to re-install or use the windows recovery several times. I tried changing both HDDs and upgrading the BIOS. Still I get the same problem.

I wouldn't mind but I was building the PC for a friend and told him that it would less likely to crash as the disks are mirrored.

I've now configured the disk as normal disks (non-RAID) and am looking for a hardware solution.

 

[gtr32au]

Hi, I'm also running Raid 5 and also have multiple drop outs, then followed by rebuilds. Now when I enter the Raid setup (ctrl I) it doesn't allow you to select anything (like its freezed) but escape still exits the setup. I think that there must be a controller issue with these boards. Does any one know if you can upgrade the firmware on the controller??

 

[laraan]

got the same problem here, using an asus rampage 2 extreme. built an raid 5 with 5x 500gb. same issue but different sata port. for me its port 5 thats constantly making trouble. got the new bios(1802) already. didn't fix it. does anyone knows a way to fix this issue? it starts to really annoy me.

 

[Guest]

I have the same problem with my ASUS Rampage GENE II with RAID 1 setup. At first I thought that I had a defective drive even though it was a brand new drive, now after replacing and rebuilding, its happening again. I'm now relying on imaging my disk frequently using Norton Ghost so I can easily rebuild in under 1/2hr but this is no reasonable fix and it blows!! wish there was a response with a fix in it but it was helpful to see others with similar problem.

I've tried all of the driver updates available on the ASUS website including the intel matric console 8.9 which is good for reporting that there's a problem but no help fixing it.

I've been looking for a pattern in what software or task I'm running when it crashes but no pattern yet. After I rebuild, it runs fine for 1-2 weeks then I get a freeze or bluescreen crash and after it boot, I see the bios display that one or both drives "have problems" with the red text instead of the usually green for the healthy drive. Rebuilding with the bios utility and then restoring my drive image seems to work but like most of you I'm looking for a true fix, like a driver that wont crash/fail. I hope it is just a driver issue and not a hardware issue that will never be solved.

 

[Guest]

I have the same problem with my ASUS Rampage GENE II with RAID 1 setup. At first I thought that I had a defective drive even though it was a brand new drive, now after replacing and rebuilding, its happening again. I'm now relying on imaging my disk frequently using Norton Ghost so I can easily rebuild in under 1/2hr but this is no reasonable fix and it blows!! wish there was a response with a fix in it but it was helpful to see others with similar problem.

I've tried all of the driver updates available on the ASUS website including the intel matric console 8.9 which is good for reporting that there's a problem but no help fixing it.

I've been looking for a pattern in what software or task I'm running when it crashes but no pattern yet. After I rebuild, it runs fine for 1-2 weeks then I get a freeze or bluescreen crash and after it boot, I see the bios display that one or both drives "have problems" with the red text instead of the usually green for the healthy drive. Rebuilding with the bios utility and then restoring my drive image seems to work but like most of you I'm looking for a true fix, like a driver that wont crash/fail. I hope it is just a driver issue and not a hardware issue that will never be solved.

Are you guys using the right drives? You can't use drives w/o TLER. Western Digital has disabled the TLER for non-Enterprise drives, so if you're using a WD that isn't expressly designated for RAID, you're going to have problems.

 

[laraan]

hey, wasn't looking for an solution for a time right now, just unplugged the raid and waited til i moved home again.
right now im recovering my data from the raid.

first in march i contacted the intel support about the problem. they said, that i need to go to a third party recovery tool to recover my raid.
so i thought, maybe its a problem of the board itself.
now ive stepped on an interesting topic at intel forum.

i quote:"Can an admin please sticky this to the first page:



The Intel Matrix Storage Manager 8.9 has been replaced by:



Intel Rapid Storage Technology and the current version is 9.6."

it seemed that version 8.9 had this problem. version 8.8 not. and it was fixed by intel with 9.6, but cant say it for now. the interesting thing here is, that intel did change the name of the driver. there are no notes of it, from the download page from intel and on the asus support site, there is just the old version 8.9.

for some people it seemed that just updating the driver fixed this issue.


and yes, the drives i am using (seagate) have an error correction, that cant be turned off! seagate refers to the enterprise edition of their hard drives. this error correction seemed to be the problem of version 8.9. seemed to be fix with 9.6. so it seems for now, that you CAN use normal consumer hdds.

interesting thing by the way, that ive noticed with 8.9 is, for my experience with higher temperatures of the drives the chance of loosing one is greatly decreased. without cooling one drive failed once a week. with active cooling a drive failed once a month (but during rebuild a second drive failed, so that was a bumper )

after recovering my data i'll update the driver and keep you posted of the results.

but i will certainly do regular backups. writed a little batch file for myself that copys the data from my active work folder through a network drive to an old pc that i know use as a backup server. and after copying is finished it shuts down my pc. with a little shortcut on the desktop, im really happy with this solution.