AGAIN - Very Slow RST RAID5 initialisation on Z790 - Help please!

[Richie2]

Hi there, I'm experiencing very slow initialisation of a RAID 5 array.

Specs are ASROCK z790 pro rs wifi - BIOS version 14.02 - Latest Intel Core i5-12600K 3.70GHz (Alder Lake) Socket LGA1700 2x 8gb DDR5 RAM.

The Intel RST Driver is 20.0.0.1038.3 Running Win 11 Enterprise - Fully updated OS is running on a M.2 2280 PCI-e 4.0 NVMe Solid State Drive.

The RAID 5 array is on 3x (new and empty) 12tb Seagate Ironwolf NAS SATA drives. These are connected to the onboard motherboard controller.

I've assigned the drives to the array in the bios, which also showed up in the RST windows application, but initialisation is taking waaaay too long, 4% after 24 hours!!!

CPU usage is low, it isn't doing anything other than initialising the array at the moment. The PC is a new build and is running fine with no issues other than the RAID5 problem.

As a test I can deleted the RST RAID5 array and setup the drives in Windows Storage Spaces (with parity). This seemed to work ok, a quick format had it up and running in minutes.

Storage spaces doesn't have great reviews however and I thought RST would be a more professional and reliable solution (maybe I'm wrong). Surely it isn't supposed to take a month to initialise an empty array!!?? Is there an issue with the drivers or am I doing something wrong??

Information about the issue:

• What is the normal time for this process?
• This depends on the disk performance. For example, different performance between GEN3/GEN4 NVMe, SATA SSD, SATA HDD 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm.

The array is 3x 7200rpm SATA HDD 12tb Seagate Ironwolfs, ST12000VN0008. Surely anything more than a couple of days can't be normal, let alone 20-30 days?

• Assuming this is abnormal, what could be the cause?
• We previously observed one performance issue related to SATA HDD cache design. Ex: Seagate ST500LX025.

Well, did you come up with a solution? I note the latest RST driver release is 4/14/2023. Was this issue also related to the Z790 chipset? Did it occur with other brands of HDD? Is there a fix?

• If this eventually finishes, then someday a drive fails, does that also mean I'm looking at a similar time frame to rebuild the lost data? If so, I need to rethink RAID 5 as a viable option and get another drive for 0+1.
• If one disk fails, it can still work, and you can get a new disk to rebuild RAID5. This rebuild can be done by the HSA app.

I haven't even got this far, but what is the HSA app? Does the RST software not rebuild the array.

• While initializing, the task manager shows zero drive activity. Is this normal?
• RAID initializing is mainly working inside the RST driver.

So there is a problem with the RST driver?

• While initializing, disk benchmark numbers drop tremendously. Read/write goes from 220/200 down to like 40/20. Normal?
• Since the RST driver is working on the initializing, it’s expected the performance will be impacted.

My array is empty.

Having now done some further research I note that other people have reported similar issues with both the z690 and z790 chipsets by different manufacturers, suggesting it is a driver problem. Is there a fix, if not do you have any intention of fixing this?

This is very disappointing to be honest. Myself and a friend were discussing the merits of an AMD build over an intel build the other day, and it would appear that I may have chosen wrongly.

Intel is currently investigating the cause of the issue, but to further troubleshoot it, can you check whether 3*12TB HDDs can be recognized by BIOS? if so, could you create RAID5 in BIOS first to see if there will be any improvements on initialization.

The RAID5 array was originally created in the BIOS under the INTEL RST section. I mentioned this in the first section of the post.

Richie