Crosshair X670E Hero Raid Issue

[Otto69]

I'm currently struggling using my newly built PC.
The main issue concerns the hardware raid (setup through BIOS).

Here are some specs of the PC:
- Crosshair X670E Hero
- AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
- 4 HDDs for two RAID 1
- 2 M.2 SSDs (not in the raid)
- 1 SSD (not in the raid)
- 1 HDD (not in the raid)
- Windows 11 Pro

I'm not listing the other components as I doubt it is affecting the build If required i can post more.

Explaining the issue might be a bit strange and it took me quite a while to "identify" what seems to be wrong / not working.

According to the motherboard layout in the manual I think the issue only concerns SATA6G_3 and SATA6G_4.
SATA6G_1 and SATA6G_2 are working fine. SATA6G_E1 and SATA6G_E2 also seem to work fine (not appearing in any raid configuration and not select-able, but that's fine).
At the beginning the ports SATA6G_3 and SATA6G_4 did seem to work fine. After a bit of working, i received I/O errors. The Raid was unresponsive and after a while a pop up appeared telling me that there is an I/O issue. (The raid on SATA6G_1/2 was always running fine and had no issues)
The event log shows a 153 "The IO operation at logical block address 0x22 for Disk ... (PDO name: ...) was retried.".
That's when I've started doing quite a lot of different things:
- Replacing HDDs (did not work - or only a very limited time)
- Changing SATA cables (did not work)
- Using the same HDDs on other SATA ports (did work - HDDs not broken, but all SATA ports are required)
- Recreating the Raids (did not work)
- Adding a HDD on these ports 3 and 4 without configuring a raid (did not work - note that the SATA controller was still set to RAID)

As I tried different combinations and even configured another Crosshair X670E Hero board, i suspect that there is a software / driver issue here.
Drivers:
- I have installed the drivers from the Asus site initially for the raid (AMD-RAID Bottom Device and AMD-RAID Controller (storport)). Furthermore, I see "Microsoft Storage Spaces Controller" and "Standard NVM Express Controller".
- In a later step i replaced the AMD-RAID drivers with the drivers from the AMD site (they are newer there). Anyway, that did not help.
- After that, I've adjusted some power saving settings (AHCI Link Power Management HIPM/DIPM -> Active, Turn off hard disk after: 20min, AHCI Link Power Management - Adaptive: 0ms), which didn't help either. (had to try that as it was suggested at another location in regards to RAID issues).
- Installed the AMD RAIDXpert2 software to verify the Raid state.

While verifying the Raid state with the AMD software (no errors and everything seems fine), I've noticed that my raid was "working" again respectively accessible again.
I first thought that I had magically fixed the issue.... However, later that day, I tried to access that raid again and it didn't work - IO errors all over again (note that the other raid was working properly).
While trying to reproduce what I previously did i figured out that something is really strange here, at least for me.
When the AMD RaidXpert2 software is open (manually starting that program) the second raid works perfectly, no event logs, no I/O errors. All good.
But as soon as I start the software again, the raid is not accessible anymore and errors pop up.
When the raid is not accessible and the explorer is hanging and waiting for access to the raid, starting the AMD RaidXpert2 software, will instantly solve the issue and make the raid accessible.

So this was quite a bit of a WTF moment. I've never experienced something so weird. One raid working and the other doesn't. As soon as i start a software, both are working.

Can anyone here explain what is going on and how I can properly fix this? (i do not consider running AMD RaidXpert2 all the time as proper solution 😉 ).

[Otto69]

Thank you for the feedback.

I have had the HDDs changed.

Different Western Digital. Different manufacturer. (And btw. it did occur with two of these mainboards).

That being said, I think their test environment was likely not ideal.

I once wrote a little program that writes garbage files to the HDD. All in the same folder with a counter in the file name which increases. With this setup, it was NOT possible to reproduce the issue.

The issue started when many files were created and a more complex file structure was created (respectively when old files were moved from another PC through SMB).

Long story short: No, after having tried 6 different HDDs i highly doubt that it is a HDD issue.

[Cocomocho]

Hello friend, I have followed my investigations and searching through forums, we have found the RAID problem. You have to have the RAIDXpert2 program running in the background, when it is running, the errors disappear and it starts to work fine, as soon as you close it, it starts to give problems. So it is a problem with the RAID drivers and they have to get an update. Try it to see if it fixes you. Best Regards