Question RAID 1 challenges on 2x 2TB Samsung 870 EVO on M5A97 R2.0

cab3

Junior Member
Oct 11, 1999
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I've recently updated my data drives on my Asus M5A97 R2.0 motherboard to use two 2TB Samsung 870 EVO SATA SSD's (connected to port 2 and port 4). I set them up as RAID1 using the onboard AMD RAIDXpert utility (Ports 1-4 manage RAID devices, with port 5/6 being non-RAID).

My OS/boot drive is a separate 500G SATA SSD on port 5. I do have a majority of my "user" data (documents, etc.) on the 2TB mirrored drives.

I've been experiencing a rash of errors on the RAID volume. It'll mirror fine. It'll run for a day or two, then one of the drives (it's not always the same drive) will throw some sort of error, typically starting with a "Task 30 disk error on disk", followed by a "BSL Update on disk". After a few of these, I'll get a "Disk Setdown" and the the logical drive goes Critical, and (often) a "Disk Unplugged" error.

When that happens, I typically have to reboot (making no physical changes to the system), and both drives will be online again, and I'll be able to kick off a Rebuild on the logical drive. The rebuild will complete, just fine. Everything will be great for a while, then the cycle begins again.

Has anyone experienced anything similar or have any recommendations? I'm running 3.7.1540.43 AMD Driver, which from what I can tell is the latest available for my AMD SB950 chipset. I've got full backups, external to the system so I could pretty easily rebuild from a bare metal config, but I'm not sure anything would change.

I'm nearly to the point of just passing the two drives directly into the Windows 10 OS and setting up software RAID 1. This would, presumably, also let me see more data about the SSDs themselves like the TBW and detailed SMART data (which is masked by the RAID controller, currently).

Thanks for any thoughts/suggestions/solutions!
 
Jul 27, 2020
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Also, you are using Samsung 870 EVO drives. These drives don't exactly have a stellar reputation. Maybe you could test the RAID functionality of your motherboard with some cheaper, smaller 240GB SSDs?

Don't trust your documents to RAID, by the way. Always do a regular, preferably daily, offline backup to an external HDD.

RAID is NOT backup. It's purpose is to minimize downtime, not prevent data loss (a problem on one drive, like a filesystem error wiping out the partition table, would get duplicated to the mirror drive instantly and then you would get missing partitions on both drives).
 

cab3

Junior Member
Oct 11, 1999
24
0
66
Also, you are using Samsung 870 EVO drives. These drives don't exactly have a stellar reputation. Maybe you could test the RAID functionality of your motherboard with some cheaper, smaller 240GB SSDs?

Don't trust your documents to RAID, by the way. Always do a regular, preferably daily, offline backup to an external HDD.

RAID is NOT backup. It's purpose is to minimize downtime, not prevent data loss (a problem on one drive, like a filesystem error wiping out the partition table, would get duplicated to the mirror drive instantly and then you would get missing partitions on both drives).

What's non-stellar about the 870 EVO's? I've certainly seen that they received much better reliability ratings than the QVO's or most non-Samsung SSD's from a write performance perspective.

Prior to moving to SSD, I had dual 3TB HDD's mirrored on the same motherboard, with no significant errors on the RAID other than when a drive physically died and it then rebuilt to a new drive and continued on its way until I migrated to SSD.

As for RAID as a backup, yes, I understand RAID, quite well, as my background is from Veritas Storage Foundation/InfoScale days, and my backup device is a Dell DP4400 backup appliance, as well as Veritas System Recovery to an external NAS device (Yep, RAID1, and two independent backups using different tools to different media)

I'm just befuddled about why the RAID set would see media errors much on SSD as I'd expect the drive to handle the remapping functions, and why the problem moves from drive to drive (thereby in my mind eliminating ports on the motherboard, cables, etc. as the problem doesn't follow any of those). If anyone knows of later RAIDXpert drivers (not RAIDXpert2), I'm willing to give those a shot too, but I've not found any via my motherboard manufacturer or from AMD in their chipset drivers.

Thanks, community!
 
Jul 27, 2020
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What's non-stellar about the 870 EVO's?
People have reported data loss and weird errors with the 870 EVO. Samsung probably doesn't even certify the EVO for use in RAID arrays. If you need a RAID certified drive, use the more expensive WD RED SSDs or Kingston DC500M drives. Samsung has a history of firmware bugs and I myself had a really bad experience with a single 860 EVO drive (data started vanishing on the Windows partition in front of my eyes!). I would urge you to reconsider your RAID drive choice and repurpose the 870 EVOs to some other non-critical task.