This will be a long post, so apologies in advance.
I'm not sure if this is the problem but I'll give you the symptoms and what went wrong and hopefully somewhere here has an idea.
Below is the breakdown of available SATA ports on my motherboard (ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition) and the drive configuration I'm using
4 x SATA 6G - 1 x 240GB SSD (OS drive)
(AS Media) - 3 x 4TB storage drives
4 x SATA 3G - 1 x Blu Ray Optical
(Intel X79) - 2 x 4TB storage drive
- 1 x free port
2 x SATA 6G - 2 x 2TB drives (RAID 0)
(Intel X79)
This is a newly built system in the last couple of weeks. As part of the install I initially had the SATA set as AHCI and I installed all the drivers etc, including Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST).
After I had everything set up as I wanted I went into the BIOS, changed the SATA mode to RAID and configured the RAID 0, reboot and all appeared well, but I did notice that the IRST systray icon now permanently had a circle around it like it was trying to start, and when I right click the message said IRST failed to start. I didn't give it much thought as everything was working correctly.
However last week 2 of the drives suddenly became unreadable, then were showing as RAW. The partition table was corrupted. I managed to rebuild/repair the partition table and recover most of the data, however large files (E01 image files) were corrupted and I couldn't trust them after that.
Yesterday the same thing happened to one of the disks only this time there is no partition table to recover, it's simply gone along with the backup. I can carve data normally but all the file structure etc is gone and I have no idea if the files themselves will be corrupted or not. The affected drives were part of the AS Media 6GB SATA ports ( I think).
There were some other weird symptoms too, data transfers to these drives sometimes seemed to take a very long time, particularly from USB to SATA and vice versa.
I remembered the IRST issue so I killed the service via Task Manager (2 processes were present) and instantly data transfer issues improved and general stability seemed to tighten up as well. I then completely uninstalled IRST just in case.
I'm in the process of recovering what I can from the drive and will run some tests on the drive once that's done to see if it's purely a failing hard drive, but I was curious if anyone had ever come across this type of thing before. The problems seemed to be related to IRST and the BIOS RAID controller setup.
The other thing worth mentioning is that I don't see all the SATA drives in the BIOS or in the RAID setup screen before boot, but Windows see's them all no problems.
If I go into the RAID setup I see the 2 x 2TB drives (RAID 0) and I see 2 x 4TB non raided drives, which is weird because according to the manual they are on different channels and controlled by different controllers.
In the BIOS I see these drives as well as a few others but some are missing.
The more I think on it the more I think the manual is showing the SATA channels incorrectly. I've just installed the AS Media SATA controller software which for some reason didn't install automatically. I'll have a play around when I can reboot and see if I can identify the SATA channels correctly.