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EVGA X299 FTW K Motherboard - RAID Issues

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ChrisHaack
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2017/12/09 05:35:07 (permalink)
Inside the BIOS in the advanced menu I toggled on Raid and have multiple hard drives plugged in.  I saved the bios and restarted the computer.  I re-entered the UEFI BIOS and looked under the advanced menu.  The Intel Rapid Storage Technology utility in the bios under the advanced menu is not appearing.  Page 65 of the manual talks about this.  I am running bios version 1.06.  
**Why won't it appear for me?**  Anyone else have this problem. 
 
Let me know what you guys figured out.   Is there a way to fix this?    Thank you
 
 
**(SOLVED)**
I figured out the first question.  Maybe it will help save someone else some time.
 
I went to the CSM Configuration under the boot tab in the UEFI.  Under CSM Support I select Enabled, and under storage in same menu select UEFI.  That seemed to fix the problem of not having RST appear in the advanced menu in the bios.
post edited by ChrisHaack - 2017/12/09 06:18:17
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    ChrisHaack
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    Re: EVGA X299 FTW K Motherboard - RAID Issues 2017/12/09 05:43:08 (permalink)
    One more question..
     
    I installed win 10 pro 64bit.  I was going to install the intel RST enterprise drivers that came on the CD with the motherboard after loading windows.  These provided drivers fail to install error message said 0x00004E24 This platform is not supported.  Anyone know why they are not installing?  One would think they would work if provided on website and the driver CD with motherboard.
     
    The regular RST drivers will install with no problems, but no luck with the RSTe drivers.
    post edited by ChrisHaack - 2017/12/10 06:13:42
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    Cool GTX
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    Re: EVGA X299 FTW K Motherboard - RAID Issues 2017/12/09 07:41:55 (permalink)
    Might find what your looking for at 
     
    Intel Rapid Storage Technology enterprise (Intel RSTe)
     
    Win-Raid Forum

    Learn your way around the EVGA Forums, Rules & limits on new accounts Ultimate Self-Starter Thread For New Members

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    GGTV-Jon
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    Re: EVGA X299 FTW K Motherboard - RAID Issues 2017/12/09 10:30:32 (permalink)
    For clarification what brand and size of the drive you are using and what ports on the board..


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    ChrisHaack
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    Re: EVGA X299 FTW K Motherboard - RAID Issues 2017/12/10 05:41:19 (permalink)
    I am currently raiding together 2 SATA 500 GB Samsung Pro 850 SSDs in RAID 0 & 4x SATA Western Digital Gold Enterprise 10 Tb drives in RAID 10 
    Have 2 Blu-Ray burners also connected to SATA ports.  Using all 8 SATA 6gb ports on the motherboard.
     
    SSDs port 0 & 1
    WD Gold Hdds  port 2,3,4,5
    Pioneer Blu-ray port 6
    Lite-on burner port 7
     
    No NVME or M.2 ports are being populated currently.
     
     
    I want to eventually unlock VROC () with the hardware key and PCIe card on the motherboard to speed up data transfer speeds, have larger capacity ssd arrays, and be bootable, without bottle-necking through the PCH. 
     
    I was planning on installing enterprise RSTe drivers so everything would be all set up and ready to go when hardware comes.
     
    My last machine was set up on X79 and sandy bridge, the RSTe drivers were flawless for me over the last 5 years.  Rebuilds went perfect when upgrading to larger hdds. 
     
     
    Cool GTX - I will check out win raid forum further and see if I can get to the bottom of this.  Perhaps provided RSTe drivers on CD are locked out until l install the vroc key.  That is the only conclusion I have come up with so far, but have not yet verified.
     
    I will let you know if I figure anything out.  I may just call EVGA next week and ask them directly.
    Thanks again for your help and input. 
     
     
    ````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
    PS-  Other than the raid confusion.
     
     
    This motherboard was super easy to set up, bios update was smooth,
    I had no problems setting memory XMP timings with DDR4-2666 corsair dominator platinum ram.
     
    Motherboard power delivery has been excellent my system has been super stable with intel i9 and 1080ti SLI in extended prime95, furmark, cinebench stress tests, pulling over 800 watts from the wall.
     
    My only suggestion to EVGA would be adding a windows based fan curve controller program to their motherboard software suite.
    I water cool and my system's custom loop has 21 fans, keeping things silent and high performing is important to me.  Motherboard handled the fans no problems with swiftech fan hubs. 
    Would be nice to be able to adjust fan curves in windows instead of only bios.  Adjusting them in the bios worked fine and was easy but less convenient.
    I had to do more reboots to the bios to set fan curves where I wanted them, then boot windows and test by adding load on CPU & GPUS doing various workloads to check curves.
     
    I have used EVGA products in the past and their warranty and support has been great. 
     
    What I look for in a good motherboard:
    Stability 1st 
    Performance 2nd
    High quality components 3rd (capacitors, phases, mosfets ect.)
    Features 4th
     
     
    I would recommend the EVGA X299 FTW K to anyone looking for a good x299 board.
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    ChrisHaack
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    Re: EVGA X299 FTW K Motherboard - RAID Issues 2017/12/14 06:02:07 (permalink)
    Update
     
    Still having raid issues.  Raid 10 seems to lock up during large file transfers to drives.  Anyone get the RSTe drivers working? I would like to try them to see if switching drivers fixes the problem. Running diagnostics on hard drives to see if they are the problem.
     
    Have a i9 7900x cpu.  Do these rste drivers require xeon cpu to install?
    post edited by ChrisHaack - 2017/12/14 06:53:42
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    EatSleepAndVR
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    Re: EVGA X299 FTW K Motherboard - RAID Issues 2017/12/16 02:41:06 (permalink)
    I'll chime in.  First, avoid RST.  From what I've read, it isn't real RAID; it's like a BIOS setup for what's ultimately still a software RAID, but with the added risk that if your motherboard dies, so does your RAID controller.  You'll have the same performance setting up your RAID in Disk Manager so I'd recommend that instead unless your RAID configuration is particularly complex, at which point I'd instead recommend a PCIe-based RAID controller card, perhaps something by LSI.
     
    That said, RST *does* work on the X299 FTW-K.  You have to set up the RAID in the BIOS first.  It's in Advanced -> Intel(R) Rapid Storage Technology, then Select RAID Volume, then select the drives you want to RAID by selecting their respective menus and selecting "X".  Note that you might have to enable RAID for SATA Mode Selection in Advanced -> SATA Configuration first.
     
    Don't bother with VROC unless you ABSOLUTELY MUST BOOT FROM YOUR RAID.  If you aren't using Intel SSDs, Intel says you won't be able to boot from your RAID anyway.  I think booting from non-Intel RAIDs actually works right now but only in a  after which it will allegedly stop working.  And once Intel actually figures out how they're going to handle making VROC keys available (you can't actually get keys right now, nor is Intel committing to when/how/where you'll get them), you'll have to buy a hardware key to keep using it.  You'll put it on the VROC header of the motherboard to "unlock" different RAID modes (0, then 1 and 10, then 5, or something like that) depending on how much you pay for your key.  Kind of like DLC for your motherboard.  Yes, really.  Intel... wasn't nice to X299 for RAID or PCIe lanes.
     
    Outside of brand-specific limitations, VROC appears to perform worse than a RAID set up in Disk Manager so I still wouldn't recommend it, even if you wanted to, and then even if you COULD buy the keys.  Intel says that's because I'm using non-Intel SSDs, but when I pressed them about whether or not Intel SSDs would suffer the same performance hit, they didn't know.   when testing both while putting two Samsung 960 Pro m.2 SSDs in RAID 0 via the .  By the way, this card now works with the EVGA X299 FTW-K if you update the BIOS.  (.)  Asus says it isn't supported, but it does work, and works well!  I've never seen faster performance while working on my 40-100 MB-per-file photos before.  :-)
     
    One other note about RAIDs: Please make sure you backup ANYTHING you care about (in general, but more specifically...) that's stored on a RAID 0 array.  RAID 0 = faster reads/writes but ZERO redundancy, which means if any single drive fails you lose ALL of your data.  I have my RAID 0 backing up to a pair of 8TB HDDs set up in RAID 1 so that a total of 3 copies of the data exists.  Generally, the 3-2-1 rule of backups is that your data should be in 3 different places (if it isn't, assume it doesn't/won't exist), on at least 2 mediums (example: SSD & HDD, HDD & optical disc, etc.), with at least one copy stored off-site in case of local catastrophe.
     
    Good luck!
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    ChrisHaack
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    Re: EVGA X299 FTW K Motherboard - RAID Issues 2017/12/16 05:22:00 (permalink)
    Ezraekman,  I did manage to get the standard RST drivers working both in bios and drivers installed in windows. That went rather smooth. 
    The RST(e) Enterprise drivers that came on the CD in the motherboard box are a no go on the install however, same with ones on the EVGA driver support page.
     
    I did not know that RST is software raid.  I always thought it was hardware raid processed on the X299 chipset, thanks for letting me know.  If I can't manage to get on board raid working I will pick up a LSI Hardware Raid card.  Thanks again for all your help Ezraekman. 
     
     
    Just wanted to update everyone.  I tested all four WD Gold 10TB hard drives with Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics to eliminate them as causing the issues. All extended tests and full erase tests passed.  So hard drives are good.
     
    The RAID 10 array still experiencing problems during large file transfers to and from other hard drives and SSDs in RAID or just transferring to a single drive.  The RAID array works till pushed hard with large data.
     
    I still believe it to be a driver related issue.  Smaller transfers of data 250 GB of data or so seem to copy over fine. 
     
    450 GB - 2+ Terabytes lock up and transfer speed goes to 0.  Both in windows explorer and with Teracopy program. 
     
    The hard drives are running nice, cool and everything seems normal with them.
    All drives have been scanned for errors and defragmented.
     
    I formatted disks and re made array to make sure that disk array was created properly and initialized and verified.
    Nothing is overclocked.  Computer is 100% stable and can run benchmarks/games for days with no issues, all voltages are normal.
     
    I have tried copying data a few different ways,  all of these copies had same issues
    (Array 0 -- RAID 10 - 4x HDDs)  <---data to and from---> (Array 1 -- RAID 5 3x HDDs)
    (Array 0 -- RAID 10 - 4x HDDs)  <---data to and from---> (Array 1 -- RAID 0 3x HDDs)
    (Array 0 -- RAID 10 - 4x HDDs)  <---data to and from---> (Array 1 -- RAID 0 2x SSDs)
    (Array 0 -- RAID 10 - 4x HDDs)  <---data to and from--->  Single SSD
    (Array 0 -- RAID 10 - 4x HDDs)  <---data to and from--->  Single Hard Drive
     
    HDD<---data to and from--->\
    HDD<---data to and from------>RAID 10    3 singles copying to raid 10 at same time.
    HDD<---data to and from--->/
     
    Did everything I could think of to stress drives and raise queue depth exposing any stability issues with array.
     
     
    Test Result example on 1 of the drives WD Drives in Raid 10
    These tests took around 2 days to complete.
     
    Test Option:EXTENDED TEST
    Model Number:WDC WD101KRYZ-01JPDB1
    Unit Serial Number:--
    Firmware Number:01.01H02
    Capacity:10000.83 GB
    SMART Status:PASS
    Test Result:PASS
    Test Time:12:46:04, December 15, 2017
     
    Test Option:ERASE
    Model Number:WDC WD101KRYZ-01JPDB1
    Unit Serial Number:--
    Firmware Number:01.01H02
    Capacity:10000.83 GB
    SMART Status:PASS
    Test Result:COMPLETE
    Test Time:03:08:48, December 16, 2017
     
    Test Option:QUICK TEST
    Model Number:WDC WD101KRYZ-01JPDB1
    Unit Serial Number:--
    Firmware Number:01.01H02
    Capacity:10000.83 GB
    SMART Status:PASS
    Test Result:PASS
    Test Time:03:12:18, December 16, 2017
     
     
    I am running EVGA provided Intel Rapid Storage Technology version 15.7.1.1015 currently.  Going to uninstall it and try some updated RST drivers to see if that fixes the issue.
     
    Gigabyte x299 motherboards are running Intel RST v15.8.1.1007 as of 11/7/2017.  That is a much newer driver.  Going to try that one next and see if that fixes the problem.
    I will try a few different drivers to see if I can find one that works better.
    If several work I will benchmark them and let you all know which one had the best performance.
     
    Spent quite a few hrs over on win-raid looking around.  So many drivers-- information overload .  I found another guy over there that posted he was having similar issues with large data transfers with RST version 15.7.1.1015.  He ended up doing a driver roll back to some older version.
     
    Thanks again everyone for the help.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    post edited by ChrisHaack - 2017/12/16 23:12:23
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    ChrisHaack
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    Re: EVGA X299 FTW K Motherboard - RAID Issues 2017/12/17 00:25:20 (permalink)
    I am now on the new rst drivers.  Had same problems. 
     
     
    I am now playing around with settings in RST.
     
    ---------------------------------------------------------
    Current settings are:
    Windows Write-cache buffer flushing: Disabled.
    Cache mode: Read only.
     
    These settings seemed to fix all problems with large data copying stalls.
    Lost some performance on writes but read speed is good and large data transfers don't lock up.
    --------------------------------------------------------
     
     
    Copies would lock up with setting on Cache mode: Write Back.
    I haven't tried cache mode: Write through.
     
    Just thinking out loud here..and learning as I go along.
    The WD Golds have large 256MB of cache each.  Most mainstream desktop drives are only using around 64MB.
     
    With write back enabled could copying from several drives with a small cache to an array with large cache or vice versa cause problems?  Maybe the little drives or raid controller/software can't keep up?
     
    Maybe these enterprise hard drives with large cache size are overloading the intel rst raid or system I/O somewhere else causing a freeze when the cache mode is set to write back and queue depth is loaded up.  There could be a weaker link in the chain somewhere else that is not able to handle the data I/O creating the lock up conditions.
     
    In the windows 10 resource monitor I was seeing total disk activity of all installed drives doing a total of 900MB/sec with a few 1000MB/sec peak when working raid array and other drives doing data moves with write back mode switched on.  On a 2 hour data transfer it would copy for about 20-30 minuets with spectacular performance then copy would lock, transfer speed would go to 0 bytes.
     
    Setting windows write-cache buffer flushing to disabled and cache mode to read only eliminated all my problems.  I will probably just run with those settings for now even though I may be giving up some performance.  Read speed off of the raid 10 is still 450MB/sec which is still pretty good.
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