GA-990FXA-UD5 Raid 5 3Tb problem

[mw0rks]

Hello everyone,

I'm having trouble with my raid 5. Here's the setup:

GA-990FXA-UD5 (Rev 3.0)
WD Red 3Tb in raid 5 on port 0,1,2
WD Black 1 Tb on port 5 (Windows 8 )
1000 W PSU & 32Gb Ram
All drivers supplied with the motherboard have been installed

BIOS Configuration:
Raid enabled and no issue building the raid in the BIOS. When I build the raid the initializing is done and the raid is functional.
*Raid drivers have been successfully installed during Windows 8 installation

Issue: In Windows 8, Computer Management promps me to activate the disk. When I activate the disk by choosing GUID, RaidXpert promps me that one or 2 of the disk are now offline. The raid goes in critical mode and Computer Management does not see the disk anymore. If I restart the computer and go in the raid utility: The raid cannot find the third disk and the third disk thinks that it's on is own (single disk).

I have tested the setup on Windows 7 and server 2012 with the same issue. I tested the disk with WD tool and changed sata cables; the hardware seems fine.

I have not checked if I installed Windows 8 in uefi mode. I came across other post about uefi and raid configuration but couldn't find an answer. Could that be the issue?  -- I will try to check this tonight

Could this be because I am trying to activate a 6 Tb logic partition?

Thanks,

Marc

[mw0rks]

I'm still trying to figure out the problem

Checked if windows 8 was in uefi -- YES
Reinstalled windows 8 with drives in AHCI mode and intalled both ACHI and Sata drivers while windows Installation

Using gparted to check the disks -- found a weird little partition on one of the drives that were supposed to be formatted. I also started to wipe this drive and will try to create a partition in gparted when i get back from work. I think this problem is due to disk partitioning errors. (RaidXpert was complaining about registers at location 0; this could be why it couldn't access the disk)

I will try to create a single partition on each drive and test. If it works I will retry raid 5. If not, I will try to create single partitions using another computer. This way I will isolate if the drives are the problem or not.

[mw0rks]

Created an nfts partition for each drive with gparted --> worked and Windows was able to discover and use them. It seems Windows is having an issue to perform any formating task on these disk via computer management.

I will try to switch the drives to raid mode tonight and see what happens. One weird thing I found is that when I switched for raid in the bios, the controller found a critical raid 5 array with only 1 disk.

[mw0rks]

Found the problem: I had a Zalman ZM-HDR1 that caused the drives to loose intermittent connection with the controller. Has someone ever had this issue with this product?