iaStorV.sys issue with Vista & Asus P5B Deluxe Motherboard

[Stan Kay]

I have installed Windows Vista Ultimate (build 6000) on my Asus P5B Deleuxe
based PC but
the system repeatedly produces "not responding" messages with virtually
everything I try to do
and so it is virtuallu unusable. After a tedious amount of time waiting for
the system to allow me
to do something, I have established the following:-

1. The iaStorV issue relates to the Intel 82801HR/HH/HO SATA Raid
controller built into my ASUS P5B Deluxe motherboard.
2. iaStorV.sys is a driver loaded by Vista for this raid controller
3. I am using 3 Seagate Barracuda 500 Gb hard drives in RAID 5 and there is
an issue with the RAID controller that causes the problem.

I have tried to report this matter to ASUS technical support but their
system refuses to accept my report on the grounds that I have given them an
invalid email address - there is nothing wrong with my email address!

Can anyone please offer any assistance?

[GG]

I have the same issue with Vista and two Western Digital WD2500KS in RAID 0 on P5B-E Plus, so it isn't RAID 5 related, it's a general problem, even with the latest BIOS.

I have a ASRock Motherboard ans I have just the same issue.

It seems that the problem comes from Raid driver because I had already this problem in the last times with XP SP2 too.

I tried running raid 5 in both vista and XP and found the same issue. Upon testing and benchmarking my system I came to realize that my write speeds were under 4mbps. If you really want raid 5 then I would look into getting an independant card. Otherwise think about raid 1 for reliability or the raid 0 performance which is insane on this board.

[Alexander Suhovey]

Stan Kay,

I have P5B Deluxe too, and I have to say I didn't see anything like what you
are experiencing. Actually, Vista install was beautifully seamless and it's
got all drivers installed either off the DVD or from Windows Update. Since
then I had quite a few problems with Vista, but none of them were
storage-related.

I have 2x80 Hitachi SATA drives in RAID0 connected to built-in Intel
controller as my system drive.

RAID5 is quite different than lower levels like RAID0 or 1 since it requires
much more work on part of the controller/driver during write operations.
There's a parity information that needs to be calculated for each block of
data being writed to disks and it must to be written down simultaneously
with actual data to provide redundancy. Usually RAID5 requires a separate
chip (and good one) on controller for this task for RAID5 volume to be
write-effective. And I've seen in the past some advanced controllers that
would bring Windows almost to the halt during excessive write activity on
RAID5 volumes.


I'd say the problem should be somewhere in between controller's RAID5
implementation, driver and your HDDs. Did you check if this controller has
any reported problems with RAID5 in general?


Sorry for not being too helpful with your problem, just thought I'd throw my
2 cents in.

[Excavator]

I have iastorv errors to, they show up as EventID 9 in the System Event Viewer.
I've gone through a lot of testing to get this machine running as well as it is now. The iastor errors are not happening as much and, when they do, they're only a brief pause. At least I'm not crashing all the time like I was before!!!

[dacsoft]

I am having the same issues with my Asus P5KE motherboard with 2 Seagate
500 GB drives. Worked perfect for 6 months and then started getting the
error. Every so often I get an error where the system declares the RAID
degraded and has to rebuild. I don't think that it is the drives,
because I have replaced both of them.