How to Avert Complete Disaster on Your Work PC with RAID 5
I am writing this article because so many people use PCs for work. If you can, you should configure it at-least in RAID 5 so you can work with a reasonable expectation of not being disrupted by hardware failure.
I don’t use RAID at home (Macs backup and restore great) — but I have it configured in all my work PCs (even the Dell Precision 7xxx laptop). And this totally saved me last week, as I was in the middle of several (15+) fires, and if my PC had died instead of running slower, this would have greatly made my life more miserable.
My “Aircraft Carrier” 5820 Tower is great but I had noticed a sluggishness in the past 6 months. And it got progressively worse over time. I do some crazy stuff during build to prevent manual work and I’m sure that has also caused the disk to be used more than usual. On hindsight, we should have gone with a Pro/ OEM Samsung NVMe SSD. But it’s ok — I had what I had because these drives were pretty pricey at the time we got them.
I did check the RAID “BIOS” Utility and found nothing. I mention this because most people would not know what to do until it is too late. So, I am taking you through the steps I took to debug the issue:
What is Intel VROC?
To do some types of RAID with Intel VROC and non Intel SSDs, you need to purchase a special hardware key which is plugged into the Motherboard.
This is one of the worst ideas from Capitalism which Intel has used for years. Make things unnecessarily complex, and customers run around confused figuring out how to use the things they paid for.
This is also why I have always purchased AMD CPUs for personal use.
AMD has this feature for free on some of its CPUs but interestingly, it does not include RAID 5.
I was looking for the “Add a Disk” option as I was also running out of space. Sometimes lack of free space makes the system slow. Usually these RAID utilities have all the options — not in this case though.
I have seen the Intel RAID Utility on other PCs where I have configured RAID. Hence, I went to support.dell.com and searched for a RAID utility. This is what I found:
Trying to download and install this utility takes you to the Windows Store:
When you run this app, it will open with a warning that you have old VROC drivers. So, you have to search for it on Google. This will eventually take you here:
Even though it does not show compatibility with Windows 10, it does work fine and it will tell you that it is updating the drivers and replacing the Windows Store App (selected yes). Then it works for the first time without any errors:
Then power off the PC, take the PCIe card out and replace the SSD:
What I did was replace the Intel with the new one. I am still not sure what would have happened if I had replaced the bad drive with the new one. I figured it may need the old drive to rebuild the new one. Perhaps that is not necessary. It makes sense that it could rebuild the bad drive from the existing good ones.
My PC has never worked faster. I was losing like 80% performance for months because of the bad drive. And it had gotten worse since the past few days.
The next step is to add a new drive to expand the drive space. I plan to do that tomorrow. The below article is the continuation of this story (which turned out to be a horrible experience):
Appendix
I really liked this documentation from Intel:
The list of supported third party SSDs are useful. Note, I used Samsung 970 Evo Plus which is not on this list:
This is a useful document for those confused between Intel RSTe and Intel VROC as I was:
AnandTech is great as usual in this article: