990FXA-UD3 Raid 0 keeps going offline

[countcatula]

Hello all,

I've had this setup for the last 6months:

GA-990FXA-UD3 with F2 version BIOS
AMD 1090T Phenom II x6 with G.SKILL Ripjaws 1866 16GB RAM
I have the SATA controller set to raid with 2*Crucial M4s in a stripe (0), 2*WD 7200rpm in RAID 1 and a Kingston SSD (OS disk) + BD-RW attached
GTX480*1 and a Corsair 750W Bronze.

Until a couple weeks ago, I had no issues with this setup and everything worked great. Last week, I decided to get
another 480 and put the thing in SLI. I was hesitant about the power supply but for a while everything worked great.

Then 2-3 days ago, my RAID0 stripe kept going offline. I tried different cables, different ports and then removed the
extra 480 from the motherboard but the stripe wouldn't just stay on. The RAID1 set is fine by the way and no issues
whatsoever. When I reboot, sometimes I see the stripe functional, sometimes it is offline. When I set SATA to IDE
in the BIOS and windows boots up, it manages to see only one of the SSDs in the stripe and one of the WD drives.
The other SSD and WD drive are listed as offline in diskmgmt.msc. They keep popping on and off until they finally go poof.

I upgraded the BIOS to F5, re-installed the drivers and the stripe behavior is still the same . Is there something iffy
with the RAID controller? Something wrong with the SATA ports? I checked that cables are securely plugged in (not
just SATA but every cable in the machine).

I don't honestly care for SLI and the extra 480 is out of the box and I can consider getting a raid card but I am wondering
if the board is faulty as far as the SATA ports go. At some point I will need to use at least 4 of the 6 SATA ports on the
motherboard. Eventvwr has a bunch of warnings about the disk stripe not responding (shocker) and AMD Raidxpert (god
is it useless) pops up with a warning/critical error whenever the stripe goes offline.

When I get lucky on a reboot and the stripe stays online (holds my games), I've played the games for 1-2 hours without
any issues. I am not sure what's causing this issue Please help! I don't care for the data on the stripe (just the Steam
partition) fwiw.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

I woluld doubt that the power supply is outputting enough juice to happilly run your system. The fact that it is a good make is all that is keeping it going at all I reckon.

Regarding the two SSDs I can't really say with any level of confidence what is causing the problem but a faulty controller is obviously a possibility.

Try  updating the BIOS to the latest version and make sujre that yolu disable the Keep DMI Data on the QFlash homepage whilst running the flash. Do not use @BIOS.

[absic]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is relevant to your case but you might want to check this thread at Crucial forum: http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/BSOD-Crucial-M4/td-p/79098 I'm not sure if there is new firmware for your SSD's but this is where I would start looking.

[countcatula]

Thanks guys. I am going to try updating the firmware of the M4s and see if that helps. I've had these for about 6 months (<1k hours use) but hey what do I gotta lose

[countcatula]

I changed the SATA mode to native IDE so the SSD flash update saw the disks. It updated the firmware on both the SSDs and during reboot, I changed back the setting to RAID.

When I went back to Windows, the stripe came back on but it's been doing that when I toggle the SATA setting and then goes offline after an hour or two. I started a 7z ultra archive of 108GB just to keep the stripe busy. So far when I've played games on that stripe (when it came up), it stayed up during the duration of the access, so this 7z exercise isn't conclusive. It's been running for 4 hours and it's got 3ish hours left. Once that's done, I am going to leave the machine alone for 12 hours and if the stripe is still up then, I'll get my hopes up.

Thanks a lot absic. I realized during the last week when I updated the board's BIOS that I hadn't updated the firmware for the SSDs but the silly thought process didn't go to the next step.

[absic]

Hi again,

hopefully that has cured the problem and that is one of the many reasons why we all use forums, as it is very easy to miss things in our desire to get things working.

Let us know how you get on and I will keep my fingers crossed for you.

[countcatula]

Nearly 24 hours in and the stripe is still going strong. *knock on wood* yea? Absic, cheers mate. If ever wander into Seattle, I'll buy you a cold one or two.