I have a Supermicro server that uses RSTe’s RAID 1 for it’s boot drive (2 SSDs)…see below for full system details.
For some time, I’ve been seeing a constant stream of small writes to the boot drive in Task Manager.
I finally decided to investigate today and found that IAStorDataMgrSvc.exe seems to be constantly mounting all the volumes in the system.
In Sysinternals’ Process Monitor, I can see IAStorDataMgrSvc.exe repeatedly issuing CreateFile, DeviceIoControl and CloseFile commands on \Device\Harddisk0\DR0, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 all the way through Harddisk4 but sometimes all the way to Harddisk7. It seems to go through this sequence about 10 times a second. In case it helps, the DeviceIoControl operations usually involve IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH_DIRECT but occasionally I’ll see IOCTL_DISK_GET_CACHE_INFORMATION. In between each drive in the sequence, it interacts with a bunch of registry keys. In addition, IAStorDataMgrSvc.exe also frequently interacts with the IAStorUtil folder, DLL and preferences XML file.
Using Resource Monitor, I discovered that most of the writes are going to the Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-IO/Operational log where I’m seeing about 45 events per second. It’s always the same two events:
Event ID 1 (“Windows has started processing the volume mount request”) for Volume GUID {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}
Event ID 2 (“The volume has been successfully mounted.”) for Volume GUID {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}
Question: Why is IAStorDataMgrSvc.exe doing this and how can I make it stop (or happen less often)?
Supermicro X9SRE-F (BIOS 3.2a)
Windows Server 2016 (version 1607 OS build 14393.3866)
Intel SATA Option ROM 4.1.0.1026
RSTe driver v 5.3.0.1388
2 Samsung SSD Pro 850 (256 GB) connected to onboard via RSTe RAID 1
4 WD WD80EFZX connected to LSI 9305-16i HBA and configured via Microsoft Storage Spaces
2 iSCSI drives on NAS accessible via Intel X710-DA4 10G ethernet
Note: There is a 3.3 system BIOS available from Supermicro that would upgrade the SATA Option ROM to RSTe 4.6.0.1091 (PreOS 4.6.0.1018).
FWIW, when this system used the RSTe 5.3.2.1022 drivers, the RSTe service would always crash on start-up if I had any drives connected to the LSI HBA and one or more were in a Storage Spaces pool. Upgrading to 5.3.0.1388 fixed this.
(Bump)
Anyone else seeing this? Anyone have any ideas on what I can do?
@lunadesign :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
Maybe the mismatch between the current Intel RAID ROM version of the BIOS and the in-use Intel RSTe RAID driver has caused your problem. Both (RAID ROM and RAID driver) should belong to the samt Intel RSTe platform (here: v4).
My suggestion: Update the BIOS and use the latest Intel RSTe RAID driver, which belongs to the v4 platform. Don’t forget to uninstall the currently used Intel RSTe Software from within the Control Panel , before you install the Intel RSTe Drivers & Software Set v4.7.0.1117.
Good luck!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Asus P9D-I (C222)
Windows Server 2016 (version 1607 OS build 14393.3866)
RSTe/VROC DXE 6.2
RSTe/VROC driver 6.3
2 Seagate ST6000NE0021 connected to onboard via VROC RAID 1
(Array built with RSTe 4.7, updated stepwise to VROC 6.2/6.3)
No such writes, but VROC isn’t RSTe…
UEFI or Legacy boot?
Are you sure that it’s not something else that’s just using IAStorDataMgrSvc?
What kind/version of RSTe software package did you install? Afaik iastordatamgrsvc isn’t included in later RSTe versions? Did you try to uninstall the RSTe software?