Question Strange SATA issue in ASRock UEFI

[ian.egerton]

Hi,

I have an ASRock Z370 extreme4 MB and have been using it for the past 6 months as an UNRAID server. I have 7 HDD's attached and up until last night everything was fine. I needed to reboot UNRAID and when I did it came back up with a drive missing. I hooked it up to a keyboard and monitor today and firstly verified that the drive was missing from the BIOS. I swapped some cable around and that's when things became strange. Drives would randomly disappear and be replaced with just a comma (,) or other such character and when going into the drive details it was completely wrong. Booting into UNRAID works fine though and all drives are picked up again.

I decided to reset UEFI to defaults and once I did this all drives appeared correctly in the Storage Configuration screen (see below):

Now since I had reset UEFI I went through restoring my other setting such as XMP. Once I enabled XMP and restarted UEFI again I noticed the issue with the storage configuration happened again?? (See below):

If I went into one of the drives I see this:

The drive is 12TB so obviously the Size is wrong but so is everything else. Once is disabled XML again the issue was resolved. I ran through it a few times to verify and it happens each time. XMP Enabled and the Storage Controller goes crazy, XMP Disabled and everything works as normal.

Any ideas what could be going on here?

 

[Lutfij]

What BIOS version are you working with on your motherboard at the time of writing? If you have a number of BISO versions pending update, do not jump to the latest, rather gradually work your way to the latest, taking note of any MEI updates between BIOS updates. Make and model of your PSU in the system? Age of the PSU?

 

[ian.egerton]

What BIOS version are you working with on your motherboard at the time of writing? If you have a number of BISO versions pending update, do not jump to the latest, rather gradually work your way to the latest, taking note of any MEI updates between BIOS updates. Make and model of your PSU in the system? Age of the PSU?

I'm on BIOS version 4.10 dated June 2019. There is only 1 newer version with not much details about what's in the release.

My PSU is a Corsair Builder series V2 500W 80+. It is 9 years old now, so perhaps getting on a bit.

 

[ian.egerton]

Further to this. If I reduce the number of drives connected to the MB, the rest of the drives appear again in the BIOS even with XMP enabled. Does this point more evidence towards the issue being the PSU?

 

[ian.egerton]

So I purchased a new PSU (Corsair TX550M). Initially I though all was fine but first of all no drives on the Asmedia ports SATA3_A2 & A2. I swapped drives around ports etc and they will always appear on the non "A" ports. So it's not a cable issue.

Disabling XMP consistently fixes the issue? How can xmp cause this considering the PSU is clearly not the issue?

 

[ian.egerton]

There is definitely something up with the sata on this board. The ASMedia ports are very flaky. They randomly just don't recognise drives. It's not an issue with the drives either as I have tried multiple different drives that always work in the standard sata ports but then have issues with the ASMedia ones.