Win 8.1 + Intel RST 12.8/12.9 Says disk is missing

[SKill]

Hi all,

I'm having a very strange issue that I hope the community can help with, because I feel like I might be taking crazy pills.

The Saga

A little while back, and for 2-3 years, I had an ASUS P8Z68 V/Pro motherboard on Windows 7 and then 8 using a RAID1 configuration of 2x1TB Seagate drives that are highly rated. I also use an M4 64GB SSD cache drive.

Shortly after I upgraded to windows 8.1 (though I didn't see the correlation at the time since it was a few weeks after), Intel RST told me that one of my drives was missing. It would sporadically reappear and then disappear. I replaced the SATA cable, and then upgraded my drives to 2x2TB new drives.

After upgrading the drives, the problem disappeared for a while and then reappeared. After a few times of the same behavior, one day I rebooted my machine cleanly to find that it was telling me that it couldn't find a boot device. Lovely.

NOTE: At this point I was on 12.8.0.1016 and I believe I'd also updated to 12.9.0.1001 in an attempt to resolve the issues.

After troubleshooting what I thought was every single component, I presumed the issue must be in the disk ports / controller for my out-of-support motherboard. I recently replaced the motherboard on the machine. It is now an ASUS Maximus V Extreme (I went high end in the hopes for less issues).

So, to recap, at this point I have a new motherboard, with drives 1-2 months old that I tested before installing, new cables for the drives, and the latest version of Intel RST that is on ASUS's site for my board (12.8.0.1016).

The desktop has run fine for a few days, so last night I kicked off a restore of some files and went to sleep.

I woke up to find that the system had rebooted itself and the warning is now showing again.

Theories so far, in order of plausibility:

• Intel RST has an issue with Windows 8.1 that I'm unaware of
• Is it possible that something about drive power consumption is causing this issue? Wondering if a drive is maybe going to sleep when it shouldn't and Intel RST is thinking that drive is no longer available and marking the RAID as degraded. Thoughts?
• Somehow my second set of disks, despite being new, went bad in the same exact way as the first disks
• Maybe a new cable is actually bad this time?

Questions:

• Are there any known issues with the ASUS Maximus V Extreme, or ASUS boards in general, with Intel RST software?
• If ASUS lists 12.8.0.1016 as the latest version, would trying to upgrade to 12.9.x cause issues? Can't figure out if it's a good idea or a bad idea.
• Are there any known issues with Windows 8.1 and RST that could cause this issue? I saw some things in the release notes that seemed interesting but couldn't be sure.

Thank you in advance for any help you can give. I use this machine every day for work and personal use and I would classify it as a necessity. As an IT guy, this problem has been plaguing me intellectually for months, but after killing my whole system, it's now a personal issue too.

[SKill · Accepted solution]

In this case, the issue was one of assumptions (d'oh!) and similar symptoms.

While previously I believe the motherboard was bad, in this case some unexpected pressure on a cable seems to have repeatedly made it slightly loose. It lost contact at one point which is what caused the reset and degradation.

So it was the same symptom but a different cause entirely.

Up and running with legitimate RAID and very happy about it.