How do I view my ASUS motherboard RAID status in Windows?

[audi911]

Hello,

This might be a stupid question but how do I view the status (health) of the RAID I created in Windows?

Currently, my RAID status is set to rebuilding in my motherboard but the information is limited if not non existent in the BIOS. There is no information in the BIOS that tells me what % it is at of the rebuild or anything like that. More important, it's quite inconvenient that I have to reboot my PC to verify the status.

Are there any tools that ASUS offers to see this in Windows?

Thanks

PS I dont know if Optane is the correct software but you cannot download it from the Microsoft store you click on the link and it does nothing. And, there doesn't seem to be any offline installer. When I try to install it from the driver it never installs. 

Thanks!

[Murph_9000]

(I'm assuming you're on an Intel board, trying to use Intel RST/VMD RAID, since you mentioned Optane.  Please always specify your motherboard model for stuff like this, to get the best advice.)

It seems that Intel and Microsoft have decided between them that the UI will only be available through the store (unless you have a business or education license).  That really isn't a good thing for essential system tools, but it is what it is.  ASUS have no control over that, the motherboard RAID is strictly an Intel (or AMD) thing, not anything they create.  It looks like Intel® Optane™ Memory and Storage Management is the current Windows UI/tool for managing it.  The store was being weird when I looked at it, hanging when it tried to launch the store app from the web browser, but did eventually load and offer to install the app; keep trying to get it from the store and eventually the MS stuff might work.  N.B. Optane and RAID are two separate things, and Optane is a discontinued product line at this point; but that's still the tool for now.

If all this is making you question the quality of the Intel RAID feature, I strongly recommend looking at Windows Storage Spaces, which is a standard feature of Windows 10 and 11.  The only thing it can't do is bootable RAID; it's only for data drives.  It's the same storage technology that MS have been pushing for a while on Windows Server; and can do everything traditional RAID can do plus a lot of more advanced storage management.

There's also the old Windows NT Dynamic Disks feature, which is still available and supported in Windows 11 (just hidden away in the Disk Management tool).  It's a very mature feature, works well, and lets you do traditional software RAID.

[audi911]

Is way to just get an offline installer of this software?

[Murph_9000]

You should be able to install it on the command line with "winget install 9MZNG5HZWZ1T" (you can use "winget show 9MZNG5HZWZ1T" to see which app that is, so you know what you're installing).  9MZNG5HZWZ1T is the app ID, which you get from either the store URLs or "winget search".  That still installs it using the store, but gets rid of the UI and goes directly to the download & install phase.

There's no official offline option for retail customers, as far as I can see.  MS have an offline option for some apps for business and education customers, but you need a suitably authorised account with them for that, and it looks like they want to retire even that.  They have designed the store to be online-only and it's a very closed system where you can't easily see what's going on at the back end of the store app or easily extract a download URL from it.

It's not necessarily impossible, just there's no supported way to do it.  If you Google "ms store offline install", you will find some results giving methods which might work for free apps.  I'm not going to recommend that or link anything.  Beware of the potential for malware if the download goes through any third parties.  In addition to being unsupported, it could also potentially break the EULAs, terms of service, etc; or possibly even violate the DRM provisions of the DMCA.

It's frankly a horrible change to the Windows ecosystem, something I find to be abhorrent.