nVidia nForce RAID 0+1: Stay Away From nVidia’s Drivers!!

[stimpy77]

I’ve an MSI K9N SLI Platinum with nForce 570i or something like that. I have no idea if my own situation was special to my rig, but after five re-creations of my RAID array and reinstallations of Windows and scanning each and every individual drive for errors as well as scanning RAM for errors, I am reaching the conclusion that nVidia’s own RAID drivers will corrupt the RAID array metadata and blow away all data.

Each time I installed the nVidia drivers (detected on nVidia’s web site), I’d reboot and suddenly files everywhere were getting corrupted until, after a couple hours, the Windows directory itself became unbootable and chkdsk would just collapse with unknown errors.

This started happening in Windows Server 2003 x64 after a year of successful use, and again in Server 2008 x64 when I installed a dual-boot configuration on another partition. Bootup would show that nVidia’s drivers literally tore away one or two of the drives and created an isolated RAID array, leaving the first one in a degraded state and the new second one in an error state. Deleting the second one and adding the drive(s) back in and then choosing to rebuild the array, the OS would boot and MediaShield would show % progress of the rebuild, but eventually the whole system would act erratically, the system would crash, and nothing would even boot.

I’m running right now just fine using just the Windows drivers, after a fresh re-creation of my RAID config. I’m going to leave it that way. I just hope the IT guy around here (who by the way is rather comfortable with MediaShield) doesn’t show up one evening and install this thing behind my back…

Meanwhile, I do recall that without nVidia’s drivers, hard drive performance is lackluster. I might try installing only the IDE drivers (which seem to apply to SATA drives), and not the RAID bits, but only after I have installed all of my stuff and then backed everything up to my spare drive.

[Mauller07]

hey from the sounds of it seems like its your hardware rather than the software thats at fault here

adds up towards being hardware since you stated yourself that it was working fine on a 2k3 install then started to go downhill after a year of use

i would recommend buying an pci/express raid card and using it instead if you dont want to buy a complete new pc

[philbar71]

yhea nvidia’s nforce drivers suck i installed them on my xp and it totally screwed it up.

[zarlon]

I have all but given up on using the motherboard raid controllers. Each time they would work for a while then eat the raid. This has happened on numerous workstations that I support (different models/makes of PC’s).

My thing I have noticed is that when you buy SATA hard drives the drives come configured as 1.5 GB not 3.0 BB as you would expect. Generally it involves removing a jumper on drive to initiate 3.0 GB. Check that the drives in raid are set to same speed.

[zarlon]

Well I stopped using raid couple of years ago. Seems they would work for a while then take a lunch break and never return to work. I just use the raid controllers like they are a regular SATA controller. Have 6 drives working with no problems to date.

I to have noticed that SATA drives are set to 1.5 G instead of 3 G straight from the factory. Just remove the jumper and you get 3 G. Would be nice for the manufacture to indicate this on the box thought I will admit that it is printed on the drive on how to set it. Was a while before I noticed this little tidbit. You do not have to remove the drives from your system, just take a small paper clip bend part of it straight and form a small hook at the end of straight portion. Works like a charm to remove the jumper (they are very small and hard to remove otherwise).

Zarlon

[Author]

Posts