Question Find status of RAID 1 SSD drives in Windows 11 Pro?

[David Knapp]

About a year ago, I had a Win 11 Pro PC built using an Asus TUF Gaming Z790 WiFi motherboard, two Samsung ST4000DX005-3GH101 drives in RAID 1 configuration and an Intel Raptor Lake CPU. A week or so ago, it rebooted and Windows would not start, with an error message saying no bootable drives found. I rebooted manually and it came up OK. This week, Windows is saying it cannot activate and did I change the hardware? I am wondering if one of the SSD drives failed and it reverted to using one of the mirrored drives? The Samsung Magician software does not recognize mirrored drives - I knew that. I don't know if the builder used software or hardware mirroring - my bad. While I research that, is there any software that would recognize the drive status and give me any insight into the reason for the activation issue and, perhaps, some more info on the drive mirroring? Windows 11 Pro does not seem to have anything useful. I haven't found anything on the Asus site either.

 

[USAFRet]

Reason #462 of why a good backup routine is needed.
And in the consumer space, RAID, of any type, is rarely needed.


Disregarding activation status, does the system run?

 

[David Knapp]

Reason #462 of why a good backup routine is needed.
And in the consumer space, RAID, of any type, is rarely needed.


Disregarding activation status, does the system run?

Yes, it seems to run fine, but there is an "Activation required" message that pops up on the desktop and Setup When I go into setup, the activation option fails and tells me to contact support. On reboot, I did see that the MB is using Intel RAID 1 and that it seems to be OK. I hear you about the consumer space RAID, but I come from a corporate RAID background and have seen plenty of posts about SSD drives failing early. It was working fine and did activate when the system was built, but some sort of Windows update on the 29th seems to have not worked correctly with RAID drives, at least that is a guess. I do keep cloud backups of important docs and photos, but wanted to tinker with RAID 1 on my new toy. I did look at Disk Manager and do see the RAID under Intel RAID 1 volume properties with no errors. That is buried way down in the Events log of the Disk 0 properties. There is also a message about settings migrated from prior OS installation. Perhaps somewhere along the way that clobbered the activation info. In Setup System Activation, it shows "No product key was found on my device". However, in the About screen, it does show the product ID and device ID fields.
The Windows version is 24H2, installed on 1/29/2025. The RAID actually seems to be operating OK, so perhaps that has nothing to do with the activation status.

 

[USAFRet]

Even with a fully functioning RAID 1, a good backup routine is still needed.
The RAID only protects against physical drive fail. It does little or nothing to protect against all the other forms of data loss.
Given a proper backup routine, a full drive image can be recovered to a replacement drive in an hour or so. If you suffer that downtime, the RAID isn't needed at all.

In the corporate world, sure. Downtime might = lost sales, or idle developers. $$$
But even in the corp world, a RAID 1 is supported with a real backup.

As far as "SSD drives failing early" ...no.
SSDs are proving to be more reliable than HDDs.

Lastly, I doubt the RAID functionality has anything to do with the activation status.

 

[USAFRet]

There is also a message about settings migrated from prior OS installation. Perhaps somewhere along the way that clobbered the activation info.

That might be the issue.

But not knowing where the OS install came from, how he did it, or how that RAID is instantiated...all speculation.