G'Day All from DownUnder.
I have assembled a new machine with an i5-2300 CPU on a Asus P8H67-M LE: the two "grey" SATA3 ports are connected to two brand new WD2002FAEX, SATA3 "black" HDD's, jumpers are out, set for full SATA 6Gb/s operation.
On very first power up I upgraded the BIOS to latest available on Asus support pages.
Then setup a RAID 1 Mirror Array in BIOS before doing anything else.
Installed genuine Win7-64 on partition 0 (100GB) whilst the installation routine created the usual 100MB "system reserved" partition ahead of "C:" and left the remainder of the array (ca. 1800GB) "unallocated" for Windows to deal with later.
Windows installation a breeze, no problems whatsoever. Installed Service Pack 1 and all other updates available from Microsoft.
Then installed the missing USB3 and Intel HD graphics drivers from the motherboard's CD. System all good.
After a couple of restarts, one of the last updates offered by Windows Update was the Intel Rapid Storage Technology 10.1.0.1008 which the machine installed uneventfully.
Here is my problem: everytime the machine is shut down and restarted the RAID utility appears during POST reporting the array as "degraded".
Windows then takes a very long time to boot up and once it's up and running the IRST reports "system functioning normally", the data as protected, the drives as "normal" (green tick) but starts a very, very long and drawn out "rebuild" operation, taking around 10 hrs each time.
The machine is finished and ready for delivery to a customer/friend: I cannot afford the data not to be secure and with this behaviour I cannot be assured the mirror is working correctly. Moreover, I cannot deliver a machine that is so slow to start up at every cold boot.
Cannot undertand how the IRST can report all systems normal but launch a full rebuild. Then I wonder if the hardware or H67 controller could be at fault, since the first indication of a degraded array appears during POST through the BIOS RAID Utility. The disks appear to be operating at nominal SATA3 specs but will run a WD diagnostic as soon as this nth rebuild is complete.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Paul