The Rampage III Extreme has the Marvell 88SE9128 SATA III controller which is only a 1 lane PCIe controller. It can barely support the full bandwidth potential of one SandForce 3 SATA III Drive. If you run RAID on that SATA III controller your Read/Write performance will actually be less than if you set-up your RAID on the Intel SATA II Controller.
I highly recommend that you set-up your SSDs on the Intel SATA II Controller. You will be much happier with the Read/Write speeds. Trust me, I used to have the Rampage III Extreme. I upgraded to the Black Edition specifically for the Marvell 88SE9182 Controller which is a 2 lane PCIe bus. Even this controller featuring twice the bandwidth capacity has a MAX Read/Write of 780MB/s and 600 MB/s respectively. Those figures are for SSDs which have the SandForce 3 controller. Some typical SSD drives which feature the SF3 controller include Vertex-3 and FORCE GT.
If you still want to run RAID on the Marvell 9128 Controller follow these steps. Your issue is related to one of these problems:
- Faulty SATA III Cables or cable/power connections
- Using an SSD Converter instead of hooking directly to the SATA III port from your drive
- Not using the 1003 RAID drive listed below (doesn't matter if windows recognizes the RAID, you must load this driver when using Marvell RAID)
- Bad SSD firmware flash (follow manufacturer proceedure again)
- PSU power instability (make sure you are using a dedicated power run for your SSDs so that there is no fluctation in amperage draw from other devices).
Pre-install Instructions:1) Ensure you do not have a CD/DVD Drive hooked up to the Marvell Controller
2) DO NOT use an ICYDOCK or any other 2.5 to 3.5 HDD Converter device. Hook your SSD directly to the Marvell Port using a SATA III 6Gb/s cable of 18" or less. If you already have a SATA III cable, swap it out.
3) Check your power & SATA III connections to ensure they are solid on both ends.
4) Update the firmware for your SSD drives. You must have the drives hooked up to an Intel SATA Controller to flash. Updating is critical especially if your drives have the SandForce 3 Controller in them.
Note* If your SSD drives don't show up in BIOS check your firmware version again and follow the flash, secure erase clear CMOS steps as outlined by the drive manufacturer.
5) Under Onboard Devices Enable and set the Marvell SATA III controller operating mode to RAID. Set the Intel SATA II, and jmicron eSATA controllers to AHCI. (if you're also running RAID on the Intel controller that's fine)
6) Reboot again and after POST, press CTRL + M to access the Marvell Configuration Utility.
7) Create the desired array. The RAID options on the Marvell 88SE9182 controller include: RAID 0,1 ** Stripe Sizes of: 32KB, 64KB, 128KB ** (recommend 128KB for 2-4% better overall performance) Write Back Cache On/Off (recommend On for 5-10% higher performance).
😎 Reboot and re-enter the BIOS. Under Hard Disk Drives re-order the drives so that the newly created array is the first disk in the list.
9) Download the
Marvell 88SE91xx driver 1.2.0.1003 WHQL from the Intel's website. Extract the folder and copy it to a USB memory stick. Do not use driver version 1002 or 1006 your performance will suffer.
10) Initiate Windows install
11) The install will not see the "disk" just created, click on "Load Driver" and browse the memory stick for the appropriate driver. During Windows install load the driver from this directory: \SATA3_allOS_1.2.0.1003_PV\SATA3_allOS_1.2.0.1003_PV\storport\amd64\
12) After the RAID0 is recognized by Windows, click on "Drive options (advanced)". Then click on "New" to create your new system partition. It should make a 100MB partition and the rest will be allocated for your system C drive. The system reserved 100MB much exist or Windows will fail install every time.
Note: after windows installation and all windwos updates. download and install Diskeeper 2010 or 2011 Professional with Hyperfast. Right click on you C drive and select "SSD Volumes" indicate which drives are SSDs. The program can't tell if the drives are in RAID mode. After that right click on the C drive and select "Optimize". This is the best SSD optimizer program I was able to find. Run it once per week. Or if you install or remove large programs or files run it afterwards. It maintains drive performance and clears up lots of space.
Motherboard: ASUS ROG Rampage V Edition 10
CPU: Intel 6950x 4.2GHz
GPU: 2x Nvidia ASUS RTX 3090 with EK Water Blocks
Memory: Corsair Dominator Platinum 64GB (4x8GB) 3,600 MHz
M.2 SSD: Samsung 960 Pro NVMEI
Sound: Creative XFI Fatal1ty Champion Series
PSU: Corsair AX1200i