Asrock X570 and RAID-0 Hot Swap issue

[Oldschool_OC]

Hello all,

My son's mom bought him FL Studio for Christmas, so I built him a new system that will be dedicated as a sound production rig (he does not use Thunderbolt). (The system was built back in October as I prepare early for Christmas).

Had a pretty tight budget so I went with a R3 3100 and put it in an Asrock X570 PHANTOM GAMING 4 WIFI. I had an original Wraith cooler from my 3700X build so I put that on there and OC'd it to 4.3. It received a donor GTX 970 and 16 GB DDR4 3600 (CL 16-16-16-36) G.Skill RAM. For Audio processing it got a donor SB Zx card.

For drive space it needed at least 500 GB for the C drive, and as all I had was a couple of 250 GB 850 EVO drives I set them up in RAID-0, along with 2x 1TB WD Black drives striped as a 2TB array for the D Drive.

Needless to say this machine runs quite well for what I paid for it.

Now comes the question.

When attempting to hot swap a single SATA drive into the system, no matter what I do it always needs a to be fully rebooted to recognize the drive. Not even having disk management rescan disks will bring it up.

Now, on my old z97 system that also runs in RAID-0, hot swapping a single drive is nearly instantaneous, which leads me to believe there is something about this mobo OR about AMD raid that I am unfamiliar with.

Is there any way to make the x570 RAID function as smoothly as the old z97 for hot swapping a single SATA drive?

(The single drive has its own partition and is not part of any multi disk array).

Thanks for any relevant help.

 

[Mr.Scott]

Raid affects the hot swap. My Asrock X470 board does the same thing.
With no raid, hot swap works perfectly.
I have not found a cure for this.

 

[Oldschool_OC]

Thank you for the reply, Mr Scott.

I had a suspicion that this would be the case.

Does anyone know if this limitation is the result of poorly implemented RAID on AMD's behalf, or if Asrock simply neglected to include the "hoptplug" option in the BIOS (e.g. do Asus, MSI and Gigabyte AMD boards also have this RAID limitation on their AMD platforms)?

 

[Woomack]

It's all about RAID drivers and additional software. Depends on drivers, chipset, and OS settings, it will work or not. Typically, Intel Matrix RAID handles that well while AMD not so much. If you do that via the AMD RAID application then you can force it to refresh the drives' list. It sometimes works, sometimes not.
The main difference is that Intel RAID uses pretty much the same driver for AHCI and RAID modes. It's a bit different but you can install RAID driver for a single drive or RAID and turn RAID on and off, and still be able to boot both modes. AMD requires a special RAID driver to make it work and it's a separated driver, like a whole different package with additional software.
Afaik, only AHCI mode officially supports the hot-plug feature. So considering what I said, on Intel, it's a higher chance to make it work.

 

[Oldschool_OC]

Thanks Woomack, that clarifies the issue quite nicely.

If I understand this correctly, AMD did not include an AHCI-esque component in their RAID package of drivers, leading to the hotswap issue. Meaning that if AMD does not ever decide to fix their end of the problem, it will never be resolved.

While I like the performance of my 3700x system, it will be more likely that I will build my next system on an intel platform for this one reason alone.

 

[Woomack]

I decided to use a single M.2 PCIe SSD in my rigs and keep all larger data on a NAS. Recently I changed NAS to 10GbE one and LAN is also 10GbE ("cheaper" Netgear switch). Depends on the PC, LAN cards are 2.5, 5, or 10GbE. The same NAS with RAID1 is for backup, media files, project files, and everything else so I have access from everywhere. That's me but I guess it's an option to think about instead of RAID inside the PC.