Windows 10: Intel RST RAID driver in Windows 10 causing disk errors!

Thomash,

It looks like you've just went through what I've been trying to investigate first in the hopes of avoiding issues. I was thinking of upgrading to Win 10 as well & I have the same C600/X79 Chipset on ASUS Rampage Formula MB. I have 2 Samsung EVO 500GB SSDs in RAID 0 for my primary drive, but no second RAID for storage (just 2 single 240GB SSDs from my last RAID 0 installed individually). I noticed you had issues with the older WDC drives, but did your two OCZ Vertex SSD drives have issues with RAID 0 on the drivers in Post#2 above in Win 10? Also, I've been using RSTe/AHCI CIM_CLI 3.8.1111 drivers because they pass trim commands on SSD/RAID configs. Do these drivers support this as well, or are you concerned with TRIM? Just wondering as I don't want to loose my SSD/RAID0 just to upgrade to Win 10.

 

That is not universally true. I have 2 840 Pro SSD in RAID0 for my boot disk. I had hangs after I updated from Windows 7 (not sure if they were disk driver, but I think so), but after a clean install everything is fine. It has been running for a couple of days with no issues nd I have buffer flushing disabled and write-back cache enabled.

I don't think Intel is to blame, I think Microsoft is.

.

 

I had no apparent issues with the SSD drives with any of the drivers I tried. It was only the storage volume with the WD disks that was causing the issue. Still, I can't guarantee anything, since it seems that this behaviour is depending on some property of the drives that I have no idea what is.

In short I would guess it'll probably work for you with an SSD RAID0 volume for your system drive, but I can't be sure, and all bets are off when it comes to a second RAID0 with mechanical drives.

If you have a link to the drivers with TRIM support that you've been using, I'd be happy to give them a try.

 

I've been using these drivers for some time now and have personally verified that TRIM is working a couple different ways. One is to verify TRIM is on using FSUTIL, and the second with a "TRIM Check" program that write a block of data and then targets it for delete. You run the program again in about 30 seconds or so and it verifies the block of data was processed by TRIM (I think that's how it works). In any case, everything I can find shows me TRIM is working on my RAID 0 config. The issue is I haven't been able to find a WIN 10 version of this driver that will keep TRIM working on RAID0 in Windows 10. The link below is to the drivers, but it only goes up to Win8.1, no Win 10. Here's the link:

Intel Download Center

You can read the release notes for the driver and it lists that TRIM support for SSDs in RAID 0/1/10 has been added to this series of driver (3.8.0.111 is actually one release later than the first to support this feature). I've pasted an excerpt from the release notes below. The release notes can be found on the same page as the driver download page (link above).

If you find a Win10 version of this driver that supports TRIM for SSDs in RAID 0/1/10 I would sure love to hear about it!!!

=============
Fixes/Updates
=============
Version 3.8.0.1111
1. Resolves TRIM commands may not be processes properly to SSDs on Windows*8 or Windows* Server 2012
2. Resolves the issue of the I/O appears to exceed a timeout period and SATA link may reset if the system clock change occurs while an I/O is in the progress.
3. Resolves issue of running heavy I/O to SSDs while enabling TRIM may result in the system running out of memory.
4. Adds support of the UEFI driver reporting the physical port a device is connected to
5. Adds support to configure RAID volumes using Intel(R) RSTe UEFI Human Interface Infrastructure (HII)
6. Adds support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1

Version 3.7.0.1093
1. Adds support for configuring RAID when EFI Optimixed Boot is Enabled with UEFI 2.3.1/HII-capable system BIOS (See BIOS release notes)
2. Adds TRIM support when SSDs are configured as RAID 0/1/10
3. Adds the capability to view expander and update expander fw in Windows 8 and Server 2012.
4. 3.7 drops support for Windows Vista

 

Had similar issues on a Z77 sabertooth board running 2 Intel 520m disks in raid0.
Upgraded to Win10 and everything was fine, installed all drivers etc. But then all of a sudden the OS started locking up a couple of second to some minutes after booting. Also had disk error in the event log. Did several reinstalls but never saw the connection to the RST drivers. Reinstalled Win7 and the same shit happend again. Reinstalled a couple of times and finally narrowed it down to the intel drivers. So i guess the new ones are a mess on some boards and chipsets?

 

You using the 14.5...... Intel ones from their site?

I can't get the 14.5... or 14.0... ones to install, just get "Platform not supported", but the 12.9 ones installed fine, and no crashes for me. (also have sabertooth z77).

 

Software RAID is more trouble than it's worth most of the time.

You should consider a hardware RAID in the future.

 

This isn't software RAID. That would be a RAID array defined through Windows DIsk Management, e.g.

These RAID arrays are defined by the Intel chipset hardware and exist before any software is loaded. You can define them in the UEFI. However, they do get a bit of assist from the OS driver for certain features. In some ways it's a bit of a hybrid but they're solid and OS independent. They do not have a separate CPU supporting them like a PCI card-hosted array, but are still basically hardware-level arrays.

 

This is still a software RAID, as your CPU does the work, the OS requires drivers,, and the disks must contain metadata in order to function properly.
Also known as FakeRAID. It's actually more unreliable than a RAID defined by the OS or a RAID built into the filesystem.

Not hardware level in the slightest, The firmware only defines the RAID, without software to do the work, it does nothing more than write a small amount of data at the end of the disk.

 

So you really think there's no basic difference with a RAID array defined by the OS. OK, we can agree to disagree. I have had my RAID 0 go through dozens of BSODs without problems even though the OS occasionally gets shot, and the same array with the same disks if defined in my Areca 1882 PCI controller is noticeably slower. I'd say these arrays (however you want to designate them) are well worth every penny *Biggrin. BTW, I had no problems with my Win 10 upgrade on the RAID 0 array. I am using the latest Intel rev.

 

I have also had no issues with Intel's raid (be it defined software, hybrid, hardware or what ever) and have been using it in several flavours for as long as I can remember. I have upgraded to W10 on two Intel based machines with raid. One an old 945 motherboard with a raid 1 and one with a Z77 with a raid 10 array both for data storage only. The OS is on a non raid drive, Seagate 500GB on the 945 and Samsung 128GB SSD on the Z77. W10 loaded on both without error but the Z77 machine developed file write errors and had the be "downgraded" back to W7. The old 945 still plods along without errors. The Z77 machine I forced an upgrade but the 945 upgraded naturally. My conclusion from this and what I read around the subject is that W10 is not yet fully compatible with raid. It will be interesting to see if the Z77 is offered W10 "naturally" later on. I have also seen that small SSD's (less than 256GB) can also have some issues around system restore which corrupts the system volume inf. mirroring the raid file corruption problem, so my Z77 could have been hit with a double issue. It may also be that when W10 rearranges the partitions to give a hidden restore volume it confuses the raid controller. Anyway good old Scan Disk resolves the file errors when W7 is back on.

 

Well, both my system RAID 0 and data Raid 10 are doing fine with the latest Win 10 compatible Intel RST. I believe there is a problem with RAID cache enabled. I do have cache mode off but they run just as fast.

 

Well i have some issues here and some resolutions after upgrading to Windows 10, first off my system is

Asus x58 ROG formula 3
2xwd black drives Raid 0
latest Raid Rom offered by manufacturer is 10.5.0.1034
After Win 10 started shooting BSOD's I modded Bios Raid ROM to v11.6.0.1702 <reason being it is the latest ROM supported by this intel chipset and offers trim support for SSD if i decide to upgrade, the Upgraded ROM did not solve the problem though>

Ok so Windows 10 installed on the driver i was running in windows 7, 11.6.0.1030 and after windows 10 did so it automatically upgraded my driver to 13.2.0.1022 windows10inbox<disabled automatic driver update since then>. I did not get any BSOD at the time but i tried to open RST manager software and got a application Error windows failed to load.

My first mistake was trying to upgrade to the latest 14.xxxx driver resulted in BSOD on windows boot. Then i decided to modify my Raid Rom from a recommendation someone made to me and tried the 11.7xxx Rste driver. The problem i am having with BSOD's now is directly related to the Raid manager software, if you are able to get in the O.S. and remove the software from add/remove programs. I think a good number of you will stop getting BSOD and the driver will function fine without it as long as you do not have an older chipset like mine which does not support the latest 13-14.xxxx RSTe drivers.

After i realized the Raid software was causing my BSOD's i downgraded back to the original driver. I ran Benchmarks on each driver that was stable without the RST software and found my original driver gave me the best result with speed/consistency and the 13.2 windows inbox gave me the worst results.

I would like to get my RST software to actually work, i have recently Reinstalled my Framework 3.5 in hopes the problem lies there. I have yet to try and reinstall my RST software, I will do so later when i am feeling Patient and report back.

 

Have you tried 14.5.0.1081 with RAID cache off?

 

It is still software raid in that striping and parity are done by windows driver software. In hardware raid,that is done by the hardware controller.

What distinguishes it from, say, Windows raid, is that it is supported by Intel in the chipset and bios driver so that you can boot from it.