This site has been a lifesaver but I feel I only have enough knowledge to be dangerous, really appreciate some input on using old raid rom versions.

Ok so I have an old P7P55D-LE I have kept in service for media storage given the 5 series chipset intel RAID controller.

I have had a RAID 1 volume 1.8TB running successfully for years and a few years on windows 10.

Recently I noticed that RST service is not running and I was no longer receiving the “rst is running and you are protected” message.

Opening device manager I noticed that all the storage controller drivers are from Microsoft. Opening disk manager in windows confirmed my RAID 1 volume was broken with one disk showing healthy and the other in an address conflict. So I tried to update the RST driver, which failed. Because ...

At some point in the last year probably while trouble shooting some iTunes crashes I must have stupidly changed the storage configuration on the bios back to IDE and left it. As is well documented RST will not install if RAID is disabled.

Ok so enable RAID and boot to safe mode to install RST 12.9.4.1000. Reboot.

Although the application installed this process would not install the 12.9.4.1000 driver, even after forcing the overwrite. I eventually got to a status where the RST application appeared to be working with the MS published driver 14.X something. I was able to reinstate the RAID 1 volume and verify and repair the numerous errors.

However, all of the non raid drives were showing as removable in the system tray which suggested more problems with the intel RAID SATA controller. So I reinstalled the old 8.9.0.1023 driver that came with the motherboard and the matrix app. The RAID and matrix app appear to be functioning properly, and the internal drives no longer appear as removable. The only loss is time and an annoying runtime broker error I picked up after running SFC and DISM trying to figure out why the intel RST installer refused to backdate the driver.

Subsequent attempts to install 12.9.4.1000 are all unsuccessful, the intel package x64 installer seems very finicky. The RST app may launch however the service crashes after starting. So I’m stuck at 8.9.0.1023.

If you’ve made it this far thank you, I am tempted to leave well enough alone but I really want to understand this.

1) although I have a 5 series chipset my RAID ROM version is only 8.9.0.1023 (most recent BIOS from asus is installed). I could not get this to work well (drives show up as removeable) with the BEST recommended 12.9.4.1000 app version. However I have not tried 10.x or 11.x versions. I don’t know if there is a registry problem or if the problem is the 8.9.0.1023 RAID ROM. Do the raid rooms have to match?

2) I have no plans to run a SSD or RAID 0 on this machine, should I leave well enough alone and stay at 8.9.0.1023 or assuming the raid rom is the problem try to install a newer RAID ROM and attempt to reinstall the RST package? There is very little discussion on the old 8.X drivers.

3) stupid question is it normal for the drives on the intel controller to not appear in the bios? They of course appear in the intel utility accessed using cnrtl-i.

After further reading on the performance of the various drivers I thought I would give the v11 RST package a shot.

After install and reboot the RST service would start and crash. After a second instal (repair) and reboot the service starts and stays running initial testing appears stable. Too bad I didn’t test the speed of the v8 driver I wonder if it might have actually provided equivalent speed with less cpu overhead of matrix vs RST.

Have you ever tested the speed of the old v8 raid rom against the v11 rom when used with the RST v11 driver package?

I will do some performance tests.

It seemed that the major advantage of the v11 rom is the addition of TRIM for SSD which I have no plans for. I read about updating the RAID ROM to v11 and at the time decided that the potential “Asus” and size issues likely weren’t worth the risk. Unless I am missing a significant performance or feature addition?

Removing the MS box drivers is an excellent idea I will do that for sure. I hadn’t discovered that guide yet thank you for pointing it out.

@fernando

Yes excellent point regarding stability. I may actually go back to matrix manager after some testing. The functionality That seemed to be lacking with matrix manager was the ability to scan and verify RAID 1. Which is valuable. Otherwise Matrix manager doesn’t seem to have any unworkable win 10 comparability issues, and appears to have a lower resource demand.

With respect to the guides, my interpretation was that v12 was preferred being the latest and greatest for series 5 chipsets, however I understand now that the precondition is use of a corresponding RAID ROM.

It was actually your performance testing that convinced me to give v11 a go.