IMO onboard raid is less than useless. I always tell people that if you really really have to have raid, buy a real raid card. There is a reason why a quality raid controller costs hundreds of $; performance and reliability.
As to monitoring the raid array, there really is nothing for amd [other than what you found] You can check the array in the raid bios on most boards [I never use msi so I do not know if they have this option]
Again my opinion however raid is NOT for the home user. Raid is for servers that need hot plug and drive redundancy. If you are running raid with the idea of backup, it is great that you want to make backups however a much better solution is to config the drives separately and make an image of whatever drive you want with acronis true image or one of the free imaging programs.

If you are doing raid for data protection, what happens when your motherboard fails and that board is no longer available??? Your array is useless. With a real raid card, this is not an issue. Install the new mb, install windows, install your card and driver. Connect the drives and your array is right there.

 

Raid 1 for me is never about backups but protection against drive failure. And it has saved me several times over the years.

But you make good points. The amount of protection I gain with RAID 1, for my system and the rate of data change, I’m probably not getting a significant improvement over just maintaining regular backups.

The other problem that you didn’t point out is what happens when one of those drives fails? I’ve protected the data, but the drives were so old that it is getting harder to source a suitable replacement. It was a 500g drive that failed and my normal store for buying hardware from is out of stock of any 500gb drives, so I was considering replacing with 2 much bigger drives. It would be more cost effective to only get a single bigger drive and just do backups to that.

Then with a drive failure, just replace with the currently available larger size...

With regard to raid cards, I had one for a much older system, but had problems with upgrade, because the old card was a pci card with raid for IDE drives. It became difficult to find a new motherboard that had pci slots everything these days is pci-e, and then also it became difficult to source new IDE drives.

So thanks for making me think outside my server mentality. You just saved me from buying 2 3tb drives

Will reconsider my storage/data protection strategy.

Regards
John

 

If you have a drive failure, it is a very simple procedure to install a new drive and restore an image. Doing it this way, you can install any size drive you want [as long as it is larger than the size of the restored image] No need to replace a 500gig ide drive with a 500gig ide; you can install a 1TB sata and restore the image.

 

Yep, I’m totally convinced

So my next question is, how do I safely break the existing 1tb mirror?

Maybe backup to new drive, the turn off mobo raid mode and reformat drives and then restore...

 

Do you want to keep your current install or are you intending on clean installing windows on a new drive?
BTW if one of your drives is a WD, then you can download the WD version of acronis true image.

 

Was wanting to keep the install. Windows is installed on the M.2 drive. The MOBO raid devices are data only.

All my spinning disks are seagate, and my M.2 drive is Intel.

WD is one of the brands stocked by my local computer store, so I could get a large WD drive. So a WD drive comes with Acronis? Will look into that. Might enable me to get a bigger drive.

 

The drive does not come with acronis; you download the WD version of acronis from the WD site.
https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?p=119
If your install is not part of the array, it is really simple. Just backup whatever data you want to keep. Now enter the raid bios and delete the array. Once that is complete, reboot and enter the system bios. Set the sata mode to ahci; save settings and reboot into windows and go to disk management start>run>diskmgmt.msc and hit enter. You should see your drives as unallowcated. Create a partition and format with ntfs; done. Once finished, copy back whatever data files you want.

 

Thanks for that link. Will definitely consider a WD drive...

but I have a problem... the RAID 1 array with the failed disk seems to appear for a bit on 1st boot, and then drops out of the system (was able to copy 1.5G off it before it dropped out)

If I disconnect the failed drive, the raid volume does not show up at all. So I thought I'd go into the RAID BIOS to see what the status of that array was, and if I could make it available to the OS with only half the mirror. According to the MOBO manual (available here http://download.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/E7992v1.1.zip ) you hit CTRL-F to enter the RAID BIOS, but I can't seem to get it to enter the RAID BIOS no matter how many times I press CTRL-F during the POST cycle?? Any ideas on getting to the RAID BIOS on this motherboard? or could I use something like partition magic to find the partition location after setting the SATA mode to AHCI?

 

it seems like it is only some files that when accessed cause the volume to go offline. as long as I skip those files it is ok. So far no real important stuff... just backups which I have the originals for anyway...

 

Set the sata mode to ahci; save settings and reboot into windows and go to disk management start>run>diskmgmt.msc and hit enter. You should see your drives as unallowcated. Create a partition and format with ntfs; done. Once finished, copy back whatever data files you want.

That's almost correct. After disabling the RAID setting in bios, I found that the RAID managed drives contained a "protection" partition. that diskmgmt.msc wouldn't touch. I had to go into diskpart and clear the disks from there. After that, they showed up as unallocated, and I could then partition and format.

Thanks for all that.

Forgot about the WD deal on acronis, and ended up with a Toshiba drive... oh well, the cost I saved on the drive will pay for acronis

Cheers,
John

 

(hmm I marked solved but anyone looking for the answer to my original query about installing AMD RaidXpert2 might be disappointed that I changed direction and have moved right away from the Motherboard RAID.) Oh well... Hopefully others will see the light like I did and move away from the MOBO raid too