G170 Gaming 7 - Bios keeps losing my M.2 PCie Raid

[Chow]

So I must have installed Windows 10 a dozen times so far trying to get my 2 Samsung 950 256gb PCIE SSD's to work. I've flashed to the latest bios from 5/5 (F8i) and tried F7 as well.

The process I go through is I must Enable Windows 10 support and disable CSM support (like the manual says), but in addition to that I must go into the SATA configuration and switch AHCI to RAID.

Once I do this I am able to add both the SSD's to the raid, when the windows installation starts I load the AHCI driver and it finds the raid, install goes smoothly.

What inevitably happens, however, is one time I will reboot the machine and it will no longer boot to windows, I go into the bios and CSM support will be switched to enabled. Intel Rapid Storage Technology will be missing, the raid will not show up as a boot option. I will again disable CSM follow the same steps to get the raid options to show up, but now it will show my raid 0 as failed, forcing me to recreate it in the bios, losing all the data. I installed Windows 10 just to one of the drives now.

Has anyone had more success than me with these drives in raid 0?

Any idea why the bios likes to change settings at random?

[shadowsports]

Greetings,

In this order:

Suggest you perform a battery pull, CLR_CMOS and configure BIOS from scratch.

Check the drives individually with Samsung Magician software to confirm their health

Review the RAID Config Utility's Event Log for problems or reason why the array is being dropped.  It might be the BIOS, the controller or one of the disks.

Based on the description, it sounds like the BIOS.  Hopefully a reset will help.

[Chow]

I ran Samsung Magician and performance test on my OS's SSD ran fine, also both drives show up health good, I cannot run the performance test on the drive that has no volume though.

There's a raid utility in the app center that let's me switch from AHCI to RAID which I assume just toggles the option under Peripherals/SATA Configuration. Is this what you're referring tO?

I can CLR_CMOS or hit the load optimized defaults, which sets OS in bios to "Other OS" then I switch to Windows 8/Win 10 and turn CMS off and after reboot Intel (R) Rapid Storage Technology will not show up yet. It will only show up when I go under Sata Config then set to Raid mode. One time I was able to get to Rapid Storage option while SATA was set to AHCI after I did a load optimized defaults and reboot, but was never able to do this again.

Note that the raid will boot several times successfully then suddenly one reboot and the RAID will no longer be an available boot option, then I see bios config has changed, each time CSM was enabled, removing the intel rapid storage from the peripherals menu, forcing me to restart the bios raid setup and ultimately breaking the raid and losing my data. Do you know if there is a way to go from a failed raid to a "normal" raid without a data wipe? It's tough to troubleshoot when a full windows install is required for any test.

Also does setting the SATA config to RAID to build the array sound like the correct steps for the 2x 950 PCIE drives? The manual wasn't very helpful for setting these drives up unfortunately.

I am seeing some other weird behavior, not sure if this could help solve the SSD issue or if it might help point to the MB as the potential culprit. When I install NVidia drivers it introduces audio crackling/latency issue, but this does not happen with AMD drivers installed and my old ATI 6990. Could there perhaps be an overall issue with the PCIE lanes on the MB, perhaps due to sharing? The audio issue I confirmed with latencymon that only started with the nvidia drivers. I also have this odd behavior where my microphone will randomly stop working and require me to disable/enable it in the control panel to get it to record again.

Thanks for response.

[shadowsports]

Ok.  Think I may know what this is.  When you installed Windows 10..  did you install choosing the UEFI install media...  whether DVD or USB, you must select the install option preceded by UEFI:

Selecting ANY other option can cause the behavior you are experiencing...  reversion to Legacy "CSM" mode for boot.   

[Chow]

Hmm, I'm not sure what the "UEFI install media" is, so it sounds like you may be right. Basically what I've been doing is I boot from Windows USB install disk after doing the bios steps I described, Windows 10 does not see any disks to install to, so I load the RST Intel AHCI driver and it picks up the raid. I install windows, and then it randomly comes apart on boot. I am missing something?

EDIT:
After some reading I'm working on following the steps here:
http://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-windows-10-usb-installation

Will put ISO on bootable UEFI USB as described with Rufus, could this be my issue?

[Chow]

So an update, the windows tool to create a USB Media does create UEFI usb. At any rate I used rufus and windows 10 iso to create the GPT UEFI USB and I installed windows to the raid. Interestingly for the first time it boot into the right resolution. I installed all the chipset drivers, audio drivers, etc. Reboot like a champ 10 times or so. I went to swap my nvidia card with my old ATI card since the sound problems persist. The last time I tried to swap the video card it broke the raid, so I was expecting this to happen again, and I was right. When I swapped the video card CSM enabled again. So that's pretty cool. Unfortunately my frustration level with the motherboard has reached it's peak, I'm going to try to get a refund on the board and hopefully the EK water block I bought for it and go back to ASUS, it shouldn't take 30+ hours to install a raid and there isn't any documentation from gigabyte anywhere.

Thanks for all the help though!