[SOLVED] Gigabyte Z490 Ultra - lost NVME RAID

[macphoto]

I was running a 6TB NVME RAID on my Gigabyte Aorus Z490 Ultra under Win 10. I'm pretty sure that I set it up using EZ RAID. I recently ran into a bunch of issues upgrading from Win 10 to Win 11 and ended up having to do a clean install. It was also necessary to both remove the three 2B NVME M.2 SSD's that made up the RAID and update the BIOS. Win 11 is running fine but the RAID no longer appears. Instead, I see three drives that can't be read by the OS. When I go into BIOS and click on EZ RAID, there's just a message telling me that I don't have enough hard disks. When I click on NVME, I just see my four NVME SSDs. (The first is the boot drive which is mounted on a PCI card; the other three are my former RAID drives.) Optimized default settings are loaded. I haven't configured the BIOS in any other way.

Has anyone done this before? Is there something on the three NVME drives that says "Hey I'm a RAID"? I was careful removing the drives and keeping them in order but I've learned the hard way that nothing is certain, so it's possible that I reversed the order. I could reinstall them in the opposite direction but am afraid that, if I was right the first time, I could screw things up further.

Can anyone suggest how to recover my RAID?

 

[DSzymborski]

Outside of changing SATA mode config to AHCI, it's extremely messy, and it's better to simply wipe everything and restore anything in that RAID from your backups.

Then, I'd strongly recommend you re-evaluating your needs. RAID is pointless for >99% of consumers and in a lot of ways, detrimental. Unless it's a server of the type in which uptime is more important than data protection or something that primarily deals with transferring very large sequential files, there's little benefit other than benchmarks. Especially if it's NVMe drives rather than spinning disks. At least you weren't running the OS on a RAID.

If you do have one of the uncommon scenarios in which a RAID makes sense, then do it properly and get a real RAID controller.

 

[USAFRet]

RAID....what type RAID array?
0, 1, 5 something else?
How many drives? What size/make/model?

But really, Why RAID at all?

 

[macphoto]

Outside of changing SATA mode config to AHCI, it's extremely messy, and it's better to simply wipe everything and restore anything in that RAID from your backups.

Then, I'd strongly recommend you re-evaluating your needs. RAID is pointless for >99% of consumers and in a lot of ways, detrimental. Unless it's a server of the type in which uptime is more important than data protection or something that primarily deals with transferring very large sequential files, there's little benefit other than benchmarks. Especially if it's NVMe drives rather than spinning disks. At least you weren't running the OS on a RAID.

If you do have one of the uncommon scenarios in which a RAID makes sense, then do it properly and get a real RAID controller.

I actually had been using a Highpoint RAID controller with four spinning drives before I switched over to the NVME SSD's. The three drives hold all of my photos. I set them up as a RAID because I liked seeing one drive instead of three and it also seemed as I'd be using the space more efficiently. Now that I realize that I'm taking a performance hit, I'll follow your suggestion.

Thanks!

 

[USAFRet]

I actually had been using a Highpoint RAID controller with four spinning drives before I switched over to the NVME SSD's. The three drives hold all of my photos. I set them up as a RAID because I liked seeing one drive instead of three and it also seemed as I'd be using the space more efficiently. Now that I realize that I'm taking a performance hit, I'll follow your suggestion.

Thanks!

Was that data backed up on some other storage device?
A second and/or third copy?

 

[macphoto]

Was that data backed up on some other storage device?
A second and/or third copy?

Yes, a local backup plus the cloud. I'm following @DSymborski's advice and ditching the RAID.

 

[DSzymborski]

I'm very happy to hear you had a backup! A lot of people try RAID as a backup solution and it's awful when they lose stuff and we can't do much for them.