ASUS Z170 WS Help

[ianamck]

Looking for some guidance, help, suggestions or a big hammer.

I have the following spec for my newest build.

Cosmos II Case
Asus Z170-WS Intel Z170 (Socket 1151) DDR4 ATX Motherboard
Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2x16GB)
Captain 360 AIO Cooler
2 x Asus GeForce GTX 980Ti DC3 OC Strix 6144MB GDDR5
2 x Samsung 950 Pro 256GB M.2 PCI-e 3.0 x 4 NVMe
2 x Samsung 850 Evo SSD 1TB
2 x Western Digital 1 TB Sata Drive
EVGA SuperNova P2 1000W PSU
LG UH12NS30 12x Blu-Ray Combo Drive SATA
IcyBox Standard 5.25" Drive Bay USB 3.0 Multi Card Reader eSATA
Corsair Gaming Audio Series SP2500 High-Power 2.1 PC Speaker
System
Asus PG279Q ROG Swift 27"
Windows 10 Professional (USB Stick)


So here is the problem, I have read forum after forum and watched too many online guides and videos to the point I am either stupid, crazy or have missed something simple by confusing myself.

I have the basics only installed and powered up, that is the MOBO with CPU and AIO cooler, both sticks of memory, only one of the graphics cards and both M.2 drives installed directly on the MOBO.

What I am trying to achieve is raid 0 the two Samsung 950 Pro M.2 drives (not a problem) and install Windows 10 professional. I can create the raid in the UEFI reboot with the USB key inserted. Boots to Windows installation and start the install. The no drive is seen but I can load the Intel RST drivers and it find the raided drives but that is where it falls over. Will not let me move forward from that point.

Have tried all sort of settings changes in the UEFI but still fails at the same point.

Any help or pointers would be helpful as the ASUS support just say the drives are not supported which doesn't make any sense as the MOBO has native RAID support for M.2 drives.

 

[ianamck]

** UPDATE **

Despite the frustration I eventually managed to solve the problem.

I now have my two Samsung 950 PRO (NVMe M.2 SSD) in Bootable RAID 0 . Running at expected beneficial speed increase. How did I do it??

Starting from the UEFI Bios I selected F11 for the EZ Tuning Wizard. Select the RAID tab. Select PCIE Raid and follow through the steps to use my 2 Samsung drives for RAID. PC reboots and then set all the CSM settings to UEFI Only.

Downloaded RUFUS from here https://rufus.akeo.ie/ and created a UEFI bootable USB drive from a Windows 10 ISO. Restarted the PC with USB key in place. Followed the step to install windows. When it comes to the select drive part the newly created RAID drive will not show up. Clicked on load drivers and selected the IRST Intel drivers which you can download from here https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25165/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST-RAID-Driver from another USB key. It will take a minute or two to find the drive but eventually it will show up. Select the RAID drive and click next. Windows will start installing.

It sounds so simple and it turned out to be the case in the end. Aftr windows had loaded and installed all the drivers and updates a reboot later I tested the RAID drive for speed and I am getting in excess of 3000 (3GB) per second.

If anyone has any questions feel free to ask.

 

[Kenneth C]

Hello Ian,
My name is Kenneth C, I have been searching for what feels like month's for a solution
for my system and it just so happens it is based on what I have read you have. I have an Asus Z170-WS and I am trying to redo my Raid 0 with windows 10 PRO using 2 Samsung 950 Pro NVME 512gb. The reason I say redo is because I had it working and I updated to the latest bios 902 and the system refused to boot. It has been a nightmare ever since.
Right now the system is bare bones, I am using the on CPU video and have no Sata drives installed, just the 2 Samsung in m.2 slots 1 and 2.
I am pretty sure I need to delete the existing or old raid but I cannot find where in the bios to do this.
I tried following your **UPDATE* but still to no avail? I have an actual USB win 10 pro 64bit key and I have also created the second USB key, but none of this is relevant as I cannot setup the bios. The M.2 Samsung drives do show up in some places but I cannot delete the previous raid 0.
Sorry to have rambled on for so long but you may be my last hope, as I have a second machine with an Asrock Motherboard Z170 Formula running windows 10 in raid 0 with 2 Samsung 950 PRO NVME m.2 drives and I just followed step by step from a video from Rod Bland at Ram City in Australia. I am at the end of my rope, hope you don't mind my
full load of info to cover everything you might have needed to ask me.

Thanks in advance, Kenneth C Neil.....

 

[ianamck]

Hi Kenneth

Sorry for the slow reply, Christmas busy etc etc.

I am pleased I was not the only one suffering from the same problem trying to get things working and I am sure like you, you read a lot of information, watched the videos and tried endlessly to get things to work. Made sense to me that it should have been more straightforward especially as the motherboard came with two M.2 slots. However you must have missed the little snippet I happened to have read and that was not to update the bios or make any major tweaks post setting up your RAID otherwise it was back the beginning and start again.

While trying to get my original RAID configuration to work I actually thought I might have a duff SSD. So just installed WINDOWS 10 Pro on one unraided drive which succeeded. That is when I had a problem trying to format the drive to create the successful RAID I now have.

So less waffle lets see if I can help. In your BIOS F7 for advanced BIOS, select Advanced along the top menu, then depending on your screen size you need to scroll right to the bottom where you should see Intel Rapid Storage Technology. Select that option and you should now see any RAID array. Select your RAID array and press enter. All thing being equal you should see Delete.

Kenneth any problems note down any error message and which screen you are on and post back a reply. More than happy to help and I wont be so slow in replying next time, have set message updates if anyone else responds.

Ian McKenzie
Always Learning...

 

[Kenneth C]

Hi Ian, thanks for getting back to me. I am at the point were I might actually return this board! As you said in your posts, it's insane trying to find an actual answer to this problem. You have me on the right track though, under advanced there is no more listings of anything below the Intel(R) Thunderbolt configuration. I do believe that it did list the Intel Rapid Storage below 'Thunderbolt...' Here is a list of my Bios updates
0503, 0602, 0702, and then 0902 in Aug/26/2016. What bios are you running? In the manual it claims that you can use the Asus drivers disk that came with the board to repair or return to the original Bios, but this does not seem to work for me. Asus on there support/drivers pages used to list many older Bios but I could not find these?
I think I am going to involve Asus on this one, but most of them are clueless I have found over the years. Any thoughts or Ideas would be great, or if you know where I could find any of the older Bios....

Thanks again for replying, KCN......

 

[ncook06]

NVMe RAID broken in BIOS 801 and 902

Sorry about the delay. I saw this yesterday as I was encountering a similar issue, but I had to go through account creation to post my findings. I updated my BIOS from 602 to 902. Updating the BIOS resets the settings, so I had to enable RAID again. I tried using the EZ Tuning to enable RAID, but that doesn't do anything. The system reboots and comes right back to the same page. RAID doesn't get enabled, Intel Rapid Storage Technology doesn't get enabled, and the M.2 slots don't get RAID enabled. We just boot right back to "Are you sure you want to do this?"

This issue is present on both BIOS 0801 and 0902. The latest BIOS with this NVMe RAID working is 0602. Just "update" the BIOS to 0602 and you should be good to go. All you need to do to enable NVMe RAID is tell the EZ Tuning wizard to enable PCIe RAID.

EDIT: I'm also using RAID0 512GB 950 Pro drives with Windows 10 Pro.