Asrock x399 Taichi M.2 NVMe SSD RAID?

free-eagle, looks great, but please add your BIOS and W10 versions and it's complete.  What do you mean by

When i load the F6 Drivers all Reboots and shutdowns of windows 10 fail.

If you are doing this after installing W10, please stop and see if things work better.  I think you should need these drivers only to see the RAID for install.  When you set CSM disabled, please reboot before the next step to make sure CMS is disabled.  I am kinda grasping at straws and hoping to get a response to my request to AMD for a complete installation manual.  I think we need to muddle along as best possible right now.  AMD says W10 needs to be install with CSM disabled.  Maybe try running with it enabled after install and see if that helps.  Enjoy, John.

I wish I could help you all more that I can, but I'm working without an X399 board. A shame since I have Optane SSDs I could experiment with.

I will review the few things that I can here, and my apologies in advance since you said you have done some or all of these things already, particularly to Franz01234. I'm not sure about one or two steps, which I'll explain below.

In the UEFI/BIOS, version 1.70 installed:

Advanced\Storage Configuration screen: Set the "SATA Mode" to RAID.

Advanced\AMD PBS screen: Find the NVMe RAID mode option and set it to Enabled.

After those two steps, you must Save and Exit the UEFI, and then go right back in again.

In the Boot screen, CSM option, set Launch Storage OpROM Policy to UEFI Only. In my experience, whenever configuring the CSM option, you must Save and Exit the UEFI for it to be applied, which makes sense IMO. So Save and Exit the UEFI once again, and then go right back in again.

Do NOT ignore the restart steps, they are critical for these changes to be applied.

After this, you now are at the point where you should be able to use the Select Physical Disk, or close to it. You will probably need to Initialize each disk before you can use the Select Physical Disk option, since you have already formatted them in Windows. Or as MisterJ said, delete each disk, which AMD RAID calls a RAID disk or array, while it isn't from our point of view. Then Initialize the disks if possible, and then Create Legacy Disk before using Select Physical Disk, and finally creating the RAID array.

Always remember that you must maintain these UEFI settings at all times, or the RAID arrays will at best not work, or at worst fail beyond recovery. That means after every UEFI update or UEFI clear or Load Defaults, you MUST restore all the NMVe RAID settings BEFORE you try to boot into Windows.

About installing Windows on a single Optane SSD in general, Optane SSDs require full UEFI booting, which means CSM set to Disabled. When CSM is set to Disabled, the Launch Storage OpROM Policy option is set to UEFI Only, so that should work with AMD NVMe RAID too. When you then boot the Windows 10 installation media, you must select the entry in the boot order that is, "UEFI: <device name>", where device name is the USB installation drive. Otherwise you will not get a full UEFI booting Windows installation.

Just for your information, on my ASRock Z270 board with the three Optane SSD RAID 0 array, none of the Optane drives are shown in the Storage Configuration screen, in the M.2 slot entries. ASRock Intel chipset boards have a tool in the UEFI called System Browser, that displays the hardware in every PCIe slot, M.2 slot, SATA port, etc. None of the Optane SSDs are shown in that screen either. Otherwise, I would see NVMe SSDs like a 960 EVO displayed on that screen. The ONLY place I can see the Optane SSDs in the UEFI is the Intel RAID utility built into the UEFI.

My Optane RAID 0 array is the Windows drive/volume on the Z270 PC, so they can work as an OS drive. My one concern about using Optane SSDs with an AMD X399 NVMe system is, the UEFI does not have the Intel RAID Storage Option ROM included in it. It does have the AMD RAID Storage Option ROM. All the ASRock Z270 boards have a UEFI update for Optane support, which is no doubt the Intel Storage Option ROM that includes Optane support. That is for the standard use of Optane SSDs, which is as storage accelerator drives, which is a special type of RAID array. Whether or not an Optane SSD can work without the Intel Storage OpROM as a standalone drive, I don't know. I could test that on my Ryzen X370 PC, which unfortunately is being moved to a new PC case, so not working currently.

Thank you for your time John.

This is the screenshot you requested. It is the array management folder. As you can see I have no array at the time and I can not create a new array because that option is greyed out.


This behaves like there is no ssd attached, but when I go to controller info tab, it clearly shows the drive. It also shows there are currently 3 ssds plugged in but array count is 0. It also shows driver and firmware are up to date.


Last pic is from disk management. It shows my 3 physical disks (the optane drives) under select physical disk, but when I try to initialize disk it tells me there are no legacy disks available to create a raid disk. Convert to legacy disk tells me there are no raid disks in the system.


Let me thank you again for looking at my problem.

Best regards Franz


Edited by Franz01234 - 20 Oct 2017 at 3:04am

Thank you for your responses.
I think I set everything up correctly, but the uefi simply does not pick up the optane drives.
I set CSM oprom storage to uefi only, set sata mode to raid and enabled raid mode in amd pbs folder.
They are always shown as offline.


I suspect this is the reason why my array creation options are greyed out:


When I go to physical disk properties, this shows up:

Please note that I updated the firmware on one of the drives from K3110300 to K3110310 in hopes, it would solve my problems. It did change nothing for what I can tell.

I suspect it is a uefi problem because I can not boot from it even if I install Windows10 on one drive.
It does not recognise as a drive in uefi. (I had my other drives unplugged while testing out optane. All other drives show up here!)


These optane drives do however work flawless once windows is booted from my regular ssd.


Maybe the data in my screenshots helps with troubleshooting. I will contact Asrock support in hopes they will add optane ssd support by the time they issue their next uefi update.

Best regards, Franz

I have another strange problem...
Building the NVME Raid 0 si no problem, installing Windows 10 (1703 or 1709) with the F6 Driver is also no problem but at every Reboot of Windows the system gets stuck before the Bios Screen. Only a Hard Reset brings the system back. Also windows shut down did not switch off the system.
Without NVME Raid everything is all right....
There is no other Hardware connected to the System except the Graphics Card and the USB Keyboard.
I think the Drivers are still Beta and under Development ?!?!
Has anybody created a NVME Raid yet and Windows 10 is Working normal ?



Edited by free-eagle - 20 Oct 2017 at 2:07pm