C5F SB950 Port 3 works and fails in RAID mode

[360fusion]

Okay, I've done some testing on my mobo... get ready for a lot of information.

I've got a Crosshair V Formula, and I have a 120gb SSD as well as 4x1TB Seagate drives (not WD, because they disable raid features on consumer drives- BAD WD! BAD!). I've also got a Corsair 800D case which if you don't already know comes with a 4-drive hotswap bay and accompanying backplane.

Initially when I set up my computer, I plugged in all the drives and used the SB950 raid rom to set up a raid 5 with those 4 drives. Seemed well enough... until I got into Windows.

When I tried formatting the drive for usage, it disappeared! Strange, I thought, so I rebooted... and the SB950 was giving a warning about the array being critical, and one of the drives being out of the array. I went into the raid rom and noticed that the drive that dropped out got turned into mode. I'm not sure why it would say this instead of just not listing the drive at all, but whatever, that's what it said. Then I went into the BIOS and it said the drive wasn't even plugged in...

I turned off my computer, unplugged and replugged in the drives... turned it back on and voila, drive was back... booted into windows, tried to format again... and BAM, disappeared again.

So I installed AMD RaidXpert (why doesn't this come on the C5F Driver CD?) and after getting the drive back up, set up a RAID 10 instead because I read about Raid 5 being unstable. All seems fine in windows, I can format the drive without it disappearing... and then... randomly, it seems, a drive will drop out of the array, causing it to go critical.

It's always the same PORT, not the same drive, as I have tested with and without the backplane, swapped around drives, and tested different port configurations. Such as:

4x1TB on SB950 ports 1-4: Drive 3 drops out.
4x1TB on SB950 ports 3-6: Drive 1 drops out.

Also, the manual lists the sata port configuration as:
[5 [6
[3 [4
[1 [2

Instead of what it is on my board, which is:
[5 [6
[2 [4
[1 [3

I'm using BIOS 9913, but the problem has occurred on 0705 and 0813 as well.

Is my board bad? Or is there something else wrong?

Edit: Before anyone suggests not using Port 3 since I only have 5 drives, I plan on getting a second SSD, so this is not an option.

[FiNAS]

have you tried using the latest raid drivers?

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/11-9_win7_32-64_raid.exe

go ahead and update the other chipset drivers too:

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/11-9_vista_win7_32-64_sb.exe
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/11-9_win7_32-64_ahci.exe

[Mummy]

@360fusion, i allso noticed that BIOS shows ports differently. withs port-3 you mean? Thx!! ..i use 1 and 2 if you ask BIOS.
@FiNAS, isnt those RAID drivers for SB8xx chipset MB's? havent find ones for SB9xx yet.

[FiNAS]

SB8xx and sb9xx use the same drivers. amd appears to be so low on cash that it doesn't even have staff available to update their web page and add sb9xx driver links.

[Mummy]

ah, ok. Thx 🙂

[360fusion]

Ok, not sure what raid drivers I had installed (didn't check) but those drivers went in, and I still had to rebuild the array through the SB950 Raid Rom, but right now RaidXpert lists the 4 drives in the array and they're going through the full initialization process.

If this completes, I think this may be fixed, but we'll see. I still need to format the drive to NTFS after initialization. I'll do a full format for that, just to make sure there aren't any bad sectors on the drives.

For anyone interested, I built the array with these settings:

RAID 10
Write Thru
Stripe size: 64k
Gigabyte boundary: On

I left the GB boundary on because I figured it couldn't hurt.

Hopefully this will complete without issues. I am really ready to keep the case on this machine and forget about these problems. I have to take my graphics card out every time I want to test sata ports, and let me tell you, that's getting old quick.

[360fusion]

As soon as I tried to format it, the status of the raid went critical and the drive in slot 3 went offline.

I really am starting to think I have a flawed board. Time to call ASUS.

[360fusion]

ASUS is replacing the board. They have determined that it is defective. Pain in the **** but at least I'll (hopefully) have a properly working board when all is said and done.

Should I revert to a non-beta version of the bios before shipping it back to them, just in case?