SM951 as OS boot device information

Ohh   Sorry, I forgot about that, I had the same problem creating the Recovery Media.

Are you just asking about the Recovery Media creation process, or actually using it? I created it but did not try it yet.

Here's what I did during the creation process.  It gets to a point where it states no drivers found for the Intel SATA controller, right? I also tried to get it to load the IRST 14.6 F6 driver, used during the Windows installation, but it kept saying no drivers found like you did.

So I decided to ignore the missing driver warning, and it will continue creating the Recovery Media on a USB flash drive. When it was done I looked at the folders on the USB flash drive. Guess what I found? A folder with the name f6flpy-x64 among the other folders on the drive.

I can't recall what F6 driver version it was (maybe 14.5?), but I just deleted that folder and copied the 14.6 F6 driver folder in its place. You have a copy of that, right?

You can also see that there is a Drivers folder on the flash drive. Opening that folder shows Disk, Network, and USB folders. All of those folder were empty for me. I'm wondering if those are the folder locations where the drivers that failed to load during the creation process are meant to be.

I don't think copying the 14.6 F6 driver into the Disk folder too would hurt anything. In the same folder is a SearchPaths file. I wondered if that needed to have a line added for the Disk, etc folders. I think that file is used to search for drivers on other drives besides the Recovery media drive, so not needed.

Does this make sense? If you have questions, please ask.

I thought of something else today, about the failure of the RAID 0 array when the RST PCIE Remapping option is Disabled. Recall that I thought removing the SM951s before starting the PC after a UEFI clear or update might save the RAID 0 array, once we could set RST PCIE Remapping to Enabled?

I don't think that will work at all. Do you remember that the RST PCIE Remapping option did not exist in the Storage Configuration screen until after the SM951s were installed in the board (with CSM either Disabled, or the Launch Storage OpROM policy was set to UEFI Only, and SATA mode set to RAID) and the PC was restarted at least once?

That's how it worked for me, and I could swear you wrote the same thing in an earlier post. If the RST PCIE Remapping options do not appear until an SM951 is installed in an M.2 slot, my whole idea is worthless.   See what I mean?

Thanks for posting your experience Ronzer, although I'm not happy you lost your RAID 0 array.

Your description of the failure is identical to mine. I never had this happen with SATA SSD RAID 0 arrays. I could clear the UEFI or update to a new version, but all I had to do is reset the SATA mode to RAID right after the clear or update, and the RAID 0 array was fine.

I have no idea how to avoid this problem yet... or if it is even possible. I'm blaming it on the RST PCIe Remapping option, but that is really just a guess. I don't see this as a problem with the board or the UEFI in general. It might be due to the 14.5 Option ROM, but that is a pure guess.

IF the default setting of RST PCIe Remapping was Enabled, then things might be different, but doing that would require SATA SSD users to Disable that option.

Macrium Reflect has worked great for me with SATA RAID 0 arrays, with the UEFI configured as needed for PCIe SSDs. I have not yet attempted to restore the OS from a Macrium backup and recovery media USB flash drive which is required for that process.

The only other technique I have not tried is removing the SM951s before the UEFI clear or update, then resetting RST PCIe Remapping to Enabled, and mounting the SM951s again. A bit of a pain to do, if it will even work.

This is a cutting edge thing we are doing, the first board and Intel IRST driver that allows these RAID 0 arrays, plus a new chipset. I can't imagine this situation being permanently the way it is... or at least I hope so...

If anyone wants to monitor the temperatures of their AHCI SM951s in a RAID 0 array (or not), try CrystalDiskInfo. By some miracle it can read the temperature data of these SSDs while a member of a RAID 0 array, which is a great accomplishment IMO.



You can also choose a graph Option by choosing the temperature SMART attribute.

Download the SMART data program and benchmark here:

http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

Thx parsec.  I sent a note to support asking if the pro4 could boot the 950 from a PCIe slot.  I'll let you know what they say.  

You can contact ASRock support in the link below. If you clicked on the orange colored font Support link at the top of every forum page, all the ASRock support links are listed, including this one:

http://event.asrock.com/tsd.asp

On a Z97 board, PCIe booting through an Ultra M.2 port is one thing, and through a PCIe slot is another. Using a PCIe slot may require a UEFI/BIOS update.