Question Windows or Marvell for Raid 0 ?

[Joe Wee]

Hello,

I just upgraded to Windows 11 Pro. Windows 11 was supposed to bring over all data, setting, and apps (well it didn't.) Fortunately, I backed up my Raid drives I had on two Marvell PEXSAT34RH controller cards. When Windows 11 loaded, the Raid drives were gone; nothing from Marvell survived.

I reinstalled Marvell MSU (Marvel storage utility) and drivers. The drives were gone from explorer. Next, I load up MSU, which asked me for a domain name a password; I did know them I can't get into MSU to see what happen to the drives and CTRL + M does work. I think Windows has me installed like I'm on a server? I went to set up and windows has me as a business when I try to change it to home, it pops back to business.



Ran Windows repair with and without Marvell drivers; with the drivers the Raid drives don't show, without the drivers (don't know which drivers windows is using) Windows shows the drives and is controlling the raid 0 through "Drive Management"

So here are the questions:

Do I continue to use Windows 11 for my Raid 0 or keep trying to get Marvell to work; Is there a difference ?

Does Windows need to put the drives into a VD or VDX state?

Does Windows need the Marvell controllers, did Windows install its own drivers?

How do I get out of business setting?

I'm really lost and would appreciate any help.

Thank you for your time.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

RAID0 used to be something worth investing resources on back in the day, not today with the advent of SSD's. If you must install the drivers on your new OS, you can try and reinstall the driver in compatibility mode, i.e, Right click installer>Properties>Compatibility tab>Windows X(where X is the OS from the drop down menu).

I just upgraded to Windows 11 Pro
If you upgraded to Windows 11 using the internal upgrade path on Windows 10, you should reinstall Windows 11 after recreating your bootable USB installer for said OS, installing the OS in offline mode.

 

[johnbl]

Mavell 88SE9230 chipset came out in 2012 it is pretty old.
firmware updates may or may not have been applied to your card.

maybe go into the raid controller bios and see if you can find a firmware version/date.
if you want to get the two drives to be read correctly, I would start by getting the drives be detected and setup before you leave the raid bios. If you are not trying to recover data from the drives, I would just update the firmware in the chipset and go thru the raid bios setup. But I make a point not to do raid setups any more, since I have had to recover several simple raid drives and it was not simple because of all of the conditions that had to be met.

if you don't care about the data, I would wipe and NOT set them up on a raid controller. if you want the data, you need the same settings, same firmware version and same drivers.
generally you can not get the old correct drivers that matches the non updated firmware so you might update the firmware and use the new drivers. firmware changes when the SATA interface specs change or to fix various bugs.

I would also check the pin jumpers and the cables. if i remember some had straight cables some had a few lines twisted so you did not have to change the jumpers on the drives. (just been too long to remember)
old drive select jumpers?

 

[USAFRet]

Why RAID 0?

 

[Joe Wee]

Why RAID 0?

I have some very large HHD drives, like 2-10 and 2-16 TB. Cannot afford to invest in SSDs that size, and to save large amounts of data on a single drive takes a long time.

 

[USAFRet]

I have some very large HHD drives, like 2-10 and 2-16 TB. Cannot afford to invest in SSDs that size, and to save large amounts of data on a single drive takes a long time.

Well...for HDD, I sort of, kinda but not really get the RAID 0 thing.

But!!
A RAID 0 should never ever be instantiated without a known good backup routine.
And that backup needs to be kept up to date, every day.


What is in this array?

 

[USAFRet]

And a major upgrade, like the OS, should never ever be done without a known good backup of everything. 2nd/3rd copy, at least.
Having a single copy of your data, hoping and praying it all goes well, is a recipe for disaster.

 

[evermorex76]

If you need to access the data and it's not already lost, you can probably use DMDE to read the RAID arrays even without the controller being configured for them, although the controller itself shouldn't have lost anything even if you wiped your OS drive completely. If the issue is that you just can't reach the controller settings during startup with Ctrl-M, then using the MSU can probably access the array and get it working. If not, then DMDE can discover the RAID properties and mount it (only accessible within the DMDE application), and either copy the full set of data to another location as an image or allow you to copy individual files. Of course, you would need the space on another drive or array to do that.

The MSU doesn't actually think you've got Windows itself on a domain. Many of those applications are designed to work with domain authentication, so the interface shows it, but doesn't require it. A quick search indicates that "root" for both username and password may work, or just your Windows username and password will work. (You may have to use a domain/username format to make it work with a Microsoft account login. Using Windows Hello may also make it not work. Creating a local user account on the system just for logging into the MSU could let you get around that.) What makes you think that Windows thinks you are in a "business setting"? Show a screenshot if needed. There's no way you joined your machine to a domain without a Windows Server domain controller.

Keep in mind of course, the moment you make a change like trying to mount an array, if it wasn't correct, you've probably lost all of the data on the array.

Marvell controllers like that are "hybrid" RAID (fakeRAID) which mostly uses drivers and the system CPU to access the array. The chip itself hardly does anything other than provide a communications interface and a SATA controller. That's probably why Windows is actually picking them up in Disk Management, because there's very little difference between software RAID and fakeRAID, and the Marvell controller is just reporting them to Windows as individual drives but Windows sees the RAID configuration. Performance will be pretty much the same between the two; what you get from Marvell is basically just that you get a pretty RAID management console option that's better than Disk Management, and can be set up for monitoring and notification of events on the array. Does Disk Management show that a drive letter was assigned? Are you able to actually access the array and use it right now? Is your old data there?

 

[Joe Wee]

Well...for HDD, I sort of, kinda but not really get the RAID 0 thing.

But!!
A RAID 0 should never ever be instantiated without a known good backup routine.
And that backup needs to be kept up to date, every day.


What is in this array?

Media DSD and Videos

Backup is all good on a NAS

 

[USAFRet]

Media DSD and Videos

Backup is all good on a NAS

Well....my NAS has a little over 100TB available space.

No RAID 0 to be seen.

What are you writing this data from, and how often?

I'm just saying...RAID 0 rarely makes a good solution.
And without a good backup routine and multiple copies...even worse.

 

[Joe Wee]

If you need to access the data and it's not already lost, you can probably use DMDE to read the RAID arrays even without the controller being configured for them, although the controller itself shouldn't have lost anything even if you wiped your OS drive completely. If the issue is that you just can't reach the controller settings during startup with Ctrl-M, then using the MSU can probably access the array and get it working. If not, then DMDE can discover the RAID properties and mount it (only accessible within the DMDE application), and either copy the full set of data to another location as an image or allow you to copy individual files. Of course, you would need the space on another drive or array to do that.

The MSU doesn't actually think you've got Windows itself on a domain. Many of those applications are designed to work with domain authentication, so the interface shows it, but doesn't require it. A quick search indicates that "root" for both username and password may work, or just your Windows username and password will work. (You may have to use a domain/username format to make it work with a Microsoft account login. Using Windows Hello may also make it not work. Creating a local user account on the system just for logging into the MSU could let you get around that.) What makes you think that Windows thinks you are in a "business setting"? Show a screenshot if needed. There's no way you joined your machine to a domain without a Windows Server domain controller.

Keep in mind of course, the moment you make a change like trying to mount an array, if it wasn't correct, you've probably lost all of the data on the array.

Marvell controllers like that are "hybrid" RAID (fakeRAID) which mostly uses drivers and the system CPU to access the array. The chip itself hardly does anything other than provide a communications interface and a SATA controller. That's probably why Windows is actually picking them up in Disk Management, because there's very little difference between software RAID and fakeRAID, and the Marvell controller is just reporting them to Windows as individual drives but Windows sees the RAID configuration. Performance will be pretty much the same between the two; what you get from Marvell is basically just that you get a pretty RAID management console option that's better than Disk Management, and can be set up for monitoring and notification of events on the array. Does Disk Management show that a drive letter was assigned? Are you able to actually access the array and use it right now? Is your old data there?

 

[Joe Wee]

Thank you for your time.

I go to system properties and there is a name/name set that I didn't install and when the MSU comes up it asks for my domain name and password.

When the Marvell drivers are installed, I get nothing for the drives in DM or explorer. With the driver's removed, I get full access to the drives as raid with drive letters but, with no data, they also show in DM.

I don't see Windows drivers in Device Management, and the drives are on the Marvell card. Would I still get raid configurations if I just plugged the drives into the motherboard?

I could just load the backup onto the drive that Windows 11 and DM are controlling but, I've never used windows raid and I don't know if in will hold up?

 

[Joe Wee]

Well....my NAS has a little over 100TB available space.

No RAID 0 to be seen.

What are you writing this data from, and how often?

I'm just saying...RAID 0 rarely makes a good solution.
And without a good backup routine and multiple copies...even worse.

The NAS is raid 5 I think 50TB I work and save from the Raid 0 drives and backup every 2-3 days.

 

[USAFRet]

The NAS is raid 5 I think 50TB I work and save from the Raid 0 drives and backup every 2-3 days.

So.....

The data from the RAID 0 was backed up on the RAID 5.

What are you trying to do with this 'recovery'?

Build the system, rebuild the array, and recover the data from the RAID 5 array.
Don't try to "fix" the RAID 0 in the new system.

 

[Joe Wee]

So.....

The data from the RAID 0 was backed up on the RAID 5.

What are you trying to do with this 'recovery'?

Build the system, rebuild the array, and recover the data from the RAID 5 array.
Don't try to "fix" the RAID 0 in the new system.

Not sure if I understand. I have the raid0 on the computer work/save (data is gone) and the raid5 on the NAS for backing up the computer drives (data intact). I thought that I can recover from the NAS and rebuild the NAS from raid5 if necessary. If I rebuild from the NAS I'll be using Windows raid with Disk Management. I'm not sure about windows raid?

 

[USAFRet]

Not sure if I understand. I have the raid0 on the computer work/save (data is gone) and the raid5 on the NAS for backing up the computer drives (data intact). I thought that I can recover from the NAS and rebuild the NAS from raid5 if necessary

Wrong order.

You changed the OS.
Trying to access the "RAID 0" as it was is problematic...may fail completely.

So just create a NEW RAID 0, totally blank.
Copy the data from your backup to this new RAID 0.

(personally, I wouldn't do the RAID 0, but you do you)

 

[evermorex76]

Yeah just forget about trying to recover the existing RAID0 since you have all the data backed up. Use diskpart or the MSU to "clean" the disks, which will eliminate all traces of the previous array. Then create a new RAID0 with Disk Management or the MSU (or the Ctrl-M BIOS setup), and copy the data from the backup on the NAS.

The Marvell PCIe cards are just acting like a set of add-in SATA ports right now. (I assume you had two different RAID0 arrays configured, total of 8 drives.) If you go through the process of configuring the RAID with the cards' BIOS setup or the MSU, with the Marvell drivers installed, Windows won't see the individual disks because the drivers prevent it. The drivers make it so that the controller on the card has to report the array to the OS, where it would show up as just a single drive. Without the drivers, Windows can see the disks directly, and detects the RAID configuration, but the actual data on the disks is formatted with Marvell's proprietary coding which is why you can't see the data. So you can just use Windows software RAID if you want after wiping the disks, without the Marvell drivers, and it will work just as well. Or you can use the Marvell drivers and create the new array via the controller BIOS or MSU, and get the minor benefits of the MSU, and not have to use Microsoft's poor interface for managing RAID. (But if you use Windows RAID, you can just take those drives and plug them into any Windows computer, on any SATA port that is in standard AHCI mode, and they'd immediately work. If you use the Marvell RAID, you must transfer the PCIe card to recognize them, or connect them to another Marvell controller and import the array.)

If you have enough ports on the motherboard, then yes, you could just plug the drives in there directly and eliminate the PCIe cards and use Windows RAID. Or your motherboard may have its own RAID functionality in the Intel or AMD chipset that you could enable that would work in the same way that the Marvell cards did.

The password on the MSU is never set by the user. It just authenticates to the Windows user accounts, so you just need to use the name and password you log into Windows with. No domain should be needed unless it's a Microsoft account. As far as what System Properties shows, Windows always makes up its own name for your computer at some point (only somewhat recent versions of Windows 11 ask you for it during install/setup), and sometimes I've seen it get reset to a new random name after a major Windows Update like going from 22H2 to 23H2. It's simply not possible for your computer to be tied to a business domain without a domain controller, unless you really really fouled up somehow and have blocked out all memory of setting up an Azure domain or something. (You never mentioned what you were upgrading from to get to Win11 Pro.) Without seeing what you see, I can't think of anything further there.

I can certainly see why you might use a RAID0 when money is tight but you still need to have somewhat decent performance and extremely large amounts of space, as long as your backup to the NAS is frequent enough to ensure you won't lose recent files if one of the drives failed. If you only perform backups once every 3 days, you risk losing 3 days' worth of changes. Even 4 HDDs in RAID0 would just barely exceed the speed of a single good SATA SSD on average (they could be faster with data on the edges of the platters, but slower when the data is on the inner tracks), but for the amount of storage you're needing it would take multiple 8TB SSDs to match the capacity and speed and cost multiple times as much. (And unless you put them into a JBOD array at least, you'd have to manage them with multiple drive letters.)

Instead of using software RAID in Windows, you could also consider using Storage Spaces. It might provide options for you to have some reliability but also get the speed improvements similar to RAID0. I've never set it up myself though, and it seems like in a simple setup like this it would essentially be the same as RAID (though with better management). RAID10 or the equivalent in Storage Spaces is really ideal for having both speed and reliability, but you can't do RAID0 in Windows except the Server editions (unless you use an add-in controller that can do it) and it requires twice the disks.

 

[evermorex76]

If you upgraded to Windows 11 using the internal upgrade path on Windows 10, you should reinstall Windows 11 after recreating your bootable USB installer for said OS, installing the OS in offline mode.

Why? Windows upgrades are reasonably clean and functional these days, without a lot of cruft carried over. Only "power user" types that do a lot of fiddling and optimizing of the OS itself should really need to do a clean install in most cases; everybody else that just uses the OS to access the applications they actually use would just have a functioning OS with no noticeable differences between it and a clean install, as long as they make sure to update any drivers and software that need an update for full Win11 compatibility.

At the worst, you can just "reset" Windows 11 to get the same effect as a clean install.

 

[Joe Wee]

Why? Windows upgrades are reasonably clean and functional these days, without a lot of cruft carried over. Only "power user" types that do a lot of fiddling and optimizing of the OS itself should really need to do a clean install in most cases; everybody else that just uses the OS to access the applications they actually use would just have a functioning OS with no noticeable differences between it and a clean install, as long as they make sure to update any drivers and software that need an update for full Win11 compatibility.

At the worst, you can just "reset" Windows 11 to get the same effect as a clean install.

This is what I was concerned with. My experience with windows has been that after a period of time on Windows (up to Windows 10) the OS gets packed with so much junk and other issues that it becomes difficult to work with. I would then just install a fresh copy and load everything back.

My experience with Windows 11 is limited to one week, so I don't know much about, although it seems to be a better edition, only time will tell. If I was to abandon Marvell drivers, MSU and just use the controllers with Windows Raid, would the data survive a fresh reset if needed? Would the usage risk be about the same, i.e. a bad save being backed up?

If Windows 11 does turn out to be a better option, I could trash the entire Marvell system and go with a 8 port SATA 3 card configured to 4 arrays using Windows 11. I would put the drives on the mother board (Asus Rampage VI Omega) but it only has 6 SATA ports.

P.S. I did try my login name and password for MSU, and they didn't work; I have no way of getting into MSU. I also tried loading Marvel bios from a Dos Boot 3 times, and it couldn't find the files. I do know that my data loss was because Marvell won't work with Windows 11.

Again, Thank You for your and everyone else's time.

 

[USAFRet]

My experience with windows has been that after a period of time on Windows (up to Windows 10) the OS gets packed with so much junk and other issues that it becomes difficult to work with.

A LOT of that is user induced.

My current Win 11 Pro is 3.5 yrs old, still on the original install.

 

[evermorex76]

If I was to abandon Marvell drivers, MSU and just use the controllers with Windows Raid, would the data survive a fresh reset if needed? Would the usage risk be about the same, i.e. a bad save being backed up?

If you perform a reset of Windows, it normally only affects the OS volume. All other volumes remain unaffected. To remove other data, you have to select the option to "remove everything" and "all drives". If you did that, the software RAID configuration should still be retained, since the reset process just deletes data not partitioning and other low-level stuff, so when you reinstalled Windows it would immediately see the software RAID array with whatever partitions you had on it, but they'd be empty. You could also just unplug the RAID drives while you reset Windows, so that they'd be certain to be left alone, then plug them back in after the reset.

If Windows 11 does turn out to be a better option, I could trash the entire Marvell system and go with a 8 port SATA 3 card configured to 4 arrays using Windows 11. I would put the drives on the mother board (Asus Rampage VI Omega) but it only has 6 SATA ports.

You don't even necessarily need to change your hardware. The Marvell controller (Startech is the card brand) seems to be operating as a standard AHCI SATA controller right now, so you can just use that card and manage the drives through Disk Management. If you're able to delete the RAID configuration through DM right now and recreate it, you're good to go already. Like I said, DM is not the most friendly interface for managing RAID. There's no hierarchical view showing which drives belong to which array or which controller card they're attached to (meaning you have to figure out which disk numbers are connected to Card A and which are on Card B, if you didn't want to split an array across cards), etc., and no monitoring/notifications if a fault is detected with a drive or array so you can investigate and either fix it or determine that you'll have to replace a drive (which would require recreating the array and restoring from backup, since it's RAID0). A fakeRAID controller that has Windows management software like the MSU would provide those features.

Aside from driver compatibility (which doesn't seem to be an issue in terms of the built-in drivers Windows is using), one reason to go ahead and replace the cards would be for the interface speed. The cards you have are PCIe 2.0 x1, which means the bandwidth limit is 500MBps. Just two really good mechanical drives in RAID0 could potentially max that out while reading from the outer tracks, though it would depend on reading a large amount of sequential data to notice it. But 4 drives in RAID0 might sometimes be noticeably bottlenecked, both reading and writing. A PCIe3 x1 card would have enough bandwidth for 4 drives. If you have an 8-port card, you'd want to be sure it and the slot you use are PCIe4 x1 to be certain there is never a bottleneck, or get a card with more PCIe3 or PCIe2 lanes for equivalent bandwidth, if your motherboard has a slot that will work. (If it's a really old board, the CPU to chipset bandwidth might itself be a bottleneck.)

Also don't forget, Windows doesn't care what ports and controllers the drives are on. You could plug 6 drives into the motherboard and 2 into an add-in card and Windows will RAID them in any combination you want (even all 8 in a single array, which risks a lot of data being lost if a drive fails). The only potential downside is differences in performance of the controllers, since the motherboard's SATA could be slightly faster or slower than an add-in card in terms of latency, but I really doubt that would actually make a difference with this setup. You could use all the motherboard ports and then plug 1 drive into each of the current cards and not have any bottleneck issues that way.

For the MSU login, you could try your Microsoft account email address and password if that's the account you use to log into Windows, or try the shortened local username (your user profile folder name), or MicrosoftAccount@emailaddress. It's also possible that if Windows Hello is being used, using the account and password for any authentication might be disabled. Even though the MSU is intended for Windows Server, authentication should still function, but being tied to a Microsoft Account always complicates things. I don't really think the data loss had anything to do with compatibility with Windows 11, though, as Windows wouldn't have just deleted data from a functioning array (as you seem to have now) OR it just wouldn't have been able to see the array (as you found when the Marvell drivers are installed).

A LOT of that is user induced.

My current Win 11 Pro is 3.5 yrs old, still on the original install.

Yeah, Windows 7 and up became MUCH better about not building up cruft simply due to the OS. Windows XP needed a wipe and reinstall yearly, or more often, just because of its own updates plus driver and software updates. (Vista could have been AMAZING about the situation but nobody would care because it otherwise sucked so much.) I've migrated my current Windows 10 install across at least 3 hardware builds, including a move from an Intel system to AMD, just by moving the OS drive or cloning it to a new one. systeminfo shows the installation was 7/4/2020. I think that might have been on an HDD even. There may be some slight optimization possible by doing a complete reinstall, but nothing I'd notice in day to day usage. Some apps are absolutely terrible about just piling up update files, like antivirus.

Microsoft DID start using a delta update technology that will require Windows to retain update files indefinitely, because every later update is just the changed data from the previous major update, so it has to have all the previous ones to build the current update, like differential backups. That will definitely result in more storage space being used, as you can't "cleanup" update files, but not quite the same as cruft.

 

[USAFRet]

I've migrated my current Windows 10 install across at least 3 hardware builds, including a move from an Intel system to AMD, just by moving the OS drive or cloning it to a new one. systeminfo shows the installation was 7/4/2020.

And that is iffy.

I've had it work.
I've had it fail completely.
I've had it 'mostly work', leading to an eventual re-installation anyway.

 

[evermorex76]

And that is iffy.

I've had it work.
I've had it fail completely.
I've had it 'mostly work', leading to an eventual re-installation anyway.

I think the uninstalls for system driver sets from Intel and AMD are these days pretty comprehensive (I did do that before moving/cloning the drive between the two brands). Intel hardly even HAS it's own separate drivers for Windows anymore. Windows just uses drivers that are built-in or pulled from Windows Update for just about everything (graphics is the one thing Intel still makes driver downloads for), and Windows just won't load drivers for hardware it doesn't see anymore, though it still keeps the references to them having previously existed and does try to detect that hardware on each boot, which of course would build up in the Registry and add a little to the boot time. A lot of the problems from previous versions was due to Windows trying to load drivers for incompatible hardware that you didn't even have in the machine anymore.

I haven't had many opportunities/need to move Windows from machine to machine in a few years, though. The ones I've needed to upgrade have been SO old and SO bloated with garbage the user installed, or had failed drives, that trying to clean it up after a move would have taken forever, so a fresh install (or an OEM machine with one) has always been the better path. It's just my own systems that I know are kept cleaned up that I've migrated.

 

[USAFRet]

I think the uninstalls for system driver sets from Intel and AMD are these days pretty comprehensive (I did do that before moving/cloning the drive between the two brands). Intel hardly even HAS it's own separate drivers for Windows anymore. Windows just uses drivers that are built-in or pulled from Windows Update for just about everything (graphics is the one thing Intel still makes driver downloads for), and Windows just won't load drivers for hardware it doesn't see anymore, though it still keeps the references to them having previously existed and does try to detect that hardware on each boot, which of course would build up in the Registry and add a little to the boot time. A lot of the problems from previous versions was due to Windows trying to load drivers for incompatible hardware that you didn't even have in the machine anymore.

I haven't had many opportunities/need to move Windows from machine to machine in a few years, though. The ones I've needed to upgrade have been SO old and SO bloated with garbage the user installed, or had failed drives, that trying to clean it up after a move would have taken forever, so a fresh install (or an OEM machine with one) has always been the better path. It's just my own systems that I know are kept cleaned up that I've migrated.

I'm getting ready to move from a Ryzen 5 5600X to an Intel Ultra 7 265.
Win 11 Pro.

The current Win 11 Pro Ryzen is 3+ years old.
Just plugging the current drive into the new system and hoping it 'just works' is not even on the horizon.
Fresh install.

But this is where my multiple physical drives come in.
The OS and applications live on one drive...all my data lives on others.

 

[Joe Wee]

I think the uninstalls for system driver sets from Intel and AMD are these days pretty comprehensive (I did do that before moving/cloning the drive between the two brands). Intel hardly even HAS it's own separate drivers for Windows anymore. Windows just uses drivers that are built-in or pulled from Windows Update for just about everything (graphics is the one thing Intel still makes driver downloads for), and Windows just won't load drivers for hardware it doesn't see anymore, though it still keeps the references to them having previously existed and does try to detect that hardware on each boot, which of course would build up in the Registry and add a little to the boot time. A lot of the problems from previous versions was due to Windows trying to load drivers for incompatible hardware that you didn't even have in the machine anymore.

I haven't had many opportunities/need to move Windows from machine to machine in a few years, though. The ones I've needed to upgrade have been SO old and SO bloated with garbage the user installed, or had failed drives, that trying to clean it up after a move would have taken forever, so a fresh install (or an OEM machine with one) has always been the better path. It's just my own systems that I know are kept cleaned up that I've migrated.

Ok, I'll just roll with the Marvell cards and Windows 11

Thank you all.