Sabretoth 990FX - Cant setup RAID?

Soldato
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Got a stupid issue here.
Ok its probably me, and it usually is, but up until a few weeks ago, this setup was running RAID just fine.

The Basics we need to know, are simply that I have 4 HJard drives, 2xSSD and 2xHD

I want to have :-

2 X SSD ( 60GB Each ) in STRIPED mode, to give me the 120GB for C:

2 x HD ( 2TB Each ) STRIPED to give a 4TB drive that I will then format for C: D: and E:

Obviously, I know about the disk sizes and partitioning etc, so please its not about that.

I have been doing some playing about the last couple of weeks on this PC and now I want to set it up and sort it out to start playing on one of my others, but, I just cannot get it to do RAID at all???

In the BIOS, I have chosen RAID on all the controlers, and they go just fine.

It then loses the drives as I would expect but the RAID info does not show up?
I know that I can also press CTRL+F to get into the BIOS Setup page, but this does nothing? I have also tried a number of other possible options that other motherboards use like CTRL+ Various keys on ALT+Whatever? and also I have gone through various other random let-me-ins but nothing has got me even close to somethign like a RAID setup screen?

I am at a loss.

I have previously run this board with RAID you see, and I had ZERO issues, but now???

Please help?

Oh, and yeah, latest BIOS etc etc
 
Soldato
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Ok, I have now even gone and tried to install windows onto this board with only one SSD in it, in RAID mode.

I know the one Drive wont be RAIDed with anything, but I need to setup the RAID anyway even if I just wanted to RAID the 2x2TB Drives, but no. nothing?

Im going nuts???

Ok there are 3 controlers, and 8 ports.

SATA 0-3 - Brown
SATA 4-5 - Brown
SATA 6-7 - White

I have setup 0-3 as RAID and this then makes 4-5 as RAID also.
I am booting from a UEFI formatted USB Drive ( also tried normal - same difference )

They fail to find anything.

I have tried many combinations of keypressed to get me into the RAID setup page, but this is not happening? I am genuinnely at a total loss.
 
Soldato
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I wish I could help but I had that same board (well more or less, mine was the R1 and you probably have the R2) and I never had much luck with RAID on it. I have vague recollections of going through what you did and then just deciding to do everything from within Windows. Open up Disk Management and set the two disks to be "Dynamic Disks" and then go to "Create Volume" and select "Striped" and the two disks to use. I normally did "Mirrored" disks though as my interest was uptime, not speed. My understanding was that Windows managed it just as well as configuring it on the motherboard. But as I said, I had recurrent problems with it. Sometimes the RAID would fail (I forget the exact messages), I'd run checks on the disk from another computer, it would report in good state, I'd swap in a different disk which would run for a while and then exhibit the same behaviour... I grew to suspect, though never prove, that the motherboard's disk controllers were buggy.

I know this is no help, just nobody else has offered anything and I had recurrent problems with the same motherboard and RAID.
 
Soldato
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Thanks mate... Any help is better than no help, so no worries.

Yes, I have done the Windows software RAID and sure enough, its an idea, but its not what I want to do.

What is getting to me, is that the BIOS lets me select between IDE AHCI and RAID, but when in RAID mode, the setup page cannot be brought up, and nor does it see any drives at all anyway?

Even if I just want to use a single SSD and the 2x2TB, I have no luck.

I have even tried to have them connected to the 2 other ports and again, they dont show up in that either? Im at a complete loss.

I am inches away from giving up on the idea... Shame because this Mobo ( yes, it is the R2.0 ) is quite simply the best Motherboard that I have EVER found bar none.

I was also inches away from getting a Sabretooth for the Intels, but I never did.
 
Man of Honour
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A mate had a similar problem with his, turned out that the 990x chipset (more specifically the SB950 controller) does not like samsung 950 Evo SSD's. It works perfectly on mine with 3 mixed SSD's though, I have a 120 Kingston v3, 120 Crucial M4 and a Hypertech Firestorm (not currently in there) which all work perfectly in raid 0 without any issues at all on the same chipset.

Sounds odd that you can't get it to recognise anything at all, It should be a simple as setting it up in raid expert and then setting read ahead/write back cache depending on where you need performance. What we did to troubleshoot his was installed windows on a random drive, set up the raid and then in disk management see if windows sees it. His didn't so we contacted samsung and they were aware of the issue.

Eventually we tried his old samsung 840 Evos and it worked on them. It's funny that the exact issue you mention happened for us with those 2 samsung 850's, everything appeared to work, the drives were visible in raid xpert bios but when in windows they were not visible anywhere, no raid showing in device manager and in AMD's web based management tool we could not see the drives.

EDIT: AMD Raid expert should be CTRL+F at boot,if you have fast boot enabled in the bios it can hide the screen that tells you this. You should get this screen appear after the asus splashscreen:

 
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