X370 Fatal1ty Pro - Unable to Create Large RAID0

wardog wrote: visualsoul wrote: I haven't jumped into the RAIDXpert software as I'm at work, but I'm assuming I'll have to tell the software that the extra drive will just be a normal drive, unRAIDed. Correct. It must be "marked' as such in the SW prior.

Clarification

Correct. It must be "marked' as such USING the SW prior.

datonyb, I don't think so.  I suspect it will be taken as a spare in RAIDXpert.  If visualsoul sets it as not a spare, I would expect it to show up in disk management.
Wardog, for bubble popping, if you have some time, please run the experiment I suggested.  Use diskpart to do a clean, then see if you can create a RAID with the pair.  Use disk management to format it as GPT and you should see 6 TB or so. 
Thanks and enjoy, John.

MisterJ wrote: datonyb, I don't think so.  I suspect it will be taken as a spare in RAIDXpert.  If visualsoul sets it as not a spare, I would expect it to show up in disk management. Wardog, for bubble popping, if you have some time, please run the experiment I suggested.  Use diskpart to do a clean, then see if you can create a RAID with the pair.  Use disk management to format it as GPT and you should see 6 TB or so.  Thanks and enjoy, John.

Slowly, SLOWLY, I find myself short of large HDDs here so I find myself moving ~200 DVD ISO's off this one 3TB over to a couple WD 2TB Passports via slow usb.

When done I will.

6TB huh. RAID0 Striped. Fast, but no parity. You got it John.

visualsoul wrote: But my big question is, why doesn't Windows see the disks as usable drives?  For instance, say I have three of those 2 TB drives, but I'm only going to RAID two of them... the third is still invisible (by invisible, I mean they don't even show up in Disk Management) to the system.  I haven't jumped into the RAIDXpert software as I'm at work, but I'm assuming I'll have to tell the software that the extra drive will just be a normal drive, unRAIDed.

When you change from AHCI to RAID mode from an OS installation not done in RAID mode, you don't have RAID drivers installed after you save and exit the UEFI/BIOS. That is why your 2TB drives are not seen in Windows, etc. I'll explain more in a moment.

BTW, the only reason your OS booted after changing from AHCI to RAID mode, is because you are using an NVMe SSD as the OS drive. NVMe is separate from SATA and SATA RAID, so changing the SATA mode did not affect your NVMe SSD.

I just changed from AHCI to RAID mode in the UEFI of my X370 Killer SLI/ac board (Ahh, the life of a moderator...) and while my 960 EVO with Windows 10 booted fine, my other two SATA drives became missing. Sounds familiar? They are drives I've used with my X370 PC from the start, not new, but that makes no difference.

If you had a SATA drive as your OS drive, after changing to RAID mode from AHCI, none of your drives, including the OS drive, would have been seen by Windows, so no OS drive to boot from. That's partially a Windows issue, the registry entry for the SATA driver (AHCI or RAID) is not set to load a driver when the SATA mode is changed. The registry hack to enable Intel RAID from AHCI is changing that entry to force the Intel IRST RAID driver to install. But in that case Windows has an Intel IRST driver among its files to use. Not so for Ryzen, at least yet in Windows 10.

One detail about changing to RAID mode: You must do it in two places, the Storage Configuration screen, and in the Advanced\AMD CBS\Promontory Common Options\PT SATA Configuration Options screen. According to the RAIDXpert2 manual, both need to be set to RAID mode in order for the RAIDXpert software to work.

Checking Device Manager after changing to RAID mode in both places, I found two entries for the AMD RAID controller, but not under Storage Controllers. They were by themselves, and had a problem, each has no driver.

Two fixes for this, one is to run the AMD All in One chipset driver installation program again, or manually install the AMD Ryzen RAID driver, the SATA Floppy Image ver:8.1.0.26 from your board's download page.

I only had partial success running the AMD All in One driver installer, it only installed the AMD Ryzen RAID driver for one of the two AMD SATA controllers. I had to do a manual driver update via Device Manager for the other, pointing it to the AMD Ryzen SATA driver listed above.

Only after BOTH AMD SATA controllers had the RAID driver installed, did both of my SATA drives magically appeared again, and work normally. Note that I have no RAID arrays created at all. This is simply how the AMD RAID software works. No need to set anything as a spare.

I now have two entries (two for each controller) under Storage Controllers, which is how it should be. The IDE ATA/ATAPI entry in DM is gone, that is normal.

Question for you, although you seemed to ignore my last post, how did you get the RAIDXpert2 software installed before any of this was configured?

Here's what I did... I did the AHCI to RAID hack. While in the BIOS, I also used the option to install the RAID drivers. Once I finished the "hack", I booted normally into Windows and first installed the AMD Chipset from their website, followed by the AMD RAIDXpert2 executable afterwards, which finally worked and actually installed RAIDXpert2. Once I did that, I was able to open RAIDXpert2 and configure my RAID0.  I'm going to attempt to install my 5TB WD Black drive tonight and see if it's visible to the system.  Based on what you mentioned, there's no reason it shouldn't present itself to Windows... though this has yet to be seen.