Asus H97Plus troubleshooting guide
If you are a same type of desktop computer user like me, probably you are already so tired of finding solutions for your unique crazy problems arises from time to time. So I will write some of my experience on troubleshooting my H97Plus motherboard and the system. Note that all of these problems may happen very rarely or not at all unless you are a hardware geek.
Installing Samsung PM961 NVMe device
PM961 and SM961 are OEM equivalents to the Samsung consumer SSD 960 Evo and 960 pro respectively. Their rated Read/Write performance is 3000MBps/1200MBps for “Evo”(or PM961) and 3200MBps/1800MBps for “Pro”.
When you upgrade your old hard drive or SATA SSD into this super speed NVMe SSD for the first time, probably you will be disappointed because you don’t get the promised performance. There are few reasons behind this case.
NVMe interface does not natively supports in intel 8 series chipsets. (NVMe support available for Intel 9 series and above)
Samsung PM and SM models does not have supported official drivers and firmware upgrades yet. (may be in future, Samsung will provide some)
Asus H87 motherboard architecture has been customized to enable M.2 interface by sharing the bandwidth of two SATA 6Gbps ports.
However H97Plus handles NVMe SSD as far as possible. An unofficial NVMe controller driver is available, but it does not improve the performance, I guess it happens because the firmware upgrades are not yet available. You can try upgrading bios because latest bios could improve NVMe hardware interface. In my case that also didn’t. I got around 800 MBps effective media transfer rate which is around two times higher than typical SATA SSD speed but around 4 times lower than promised rate. Please note that sharing bandwidth of two SATA ports should theoretically enable 12Gbps link.
There are 3 experiments in my mind (not yet started). If you have experienced the same problem, you can try these out.
- Buy M.2 to PCIe adapter card and connect your NVMe drive directly into PCIe link. See whether you get the promised speed. (You can find these type of adapters at cheap price from ebay)
- Connect your NVMe drive into a friends mother board and see whether you get the promised speed. (make sure that mother board provide latest NVMe technology and included Intel 9 series or above chipset)
- Find out non OEM Samsung NVMe drive (960 Pro or 960 Evo) and connect it to the same mother board (H97Plus). See whether you get the promised speed. If not, H97Plus does not support high speed NVMe drives.
Swapping RAID disks around different ports
If you are currently using RAID arrays for your main storage, you may be so concerned about the health of the storage.
My configuration was two RAID 1 volumes using 4 SATA Hard drives.
SATA port 3,4,5,6 were occupied with four WD hard drives (same capacity)
port 3,4 drives were configured as RAID-1 volume (volume1)
port 5,6 drives were configured as RAID-1 volume (volume2)
Now I have couple of questions and answers… Notice that all of the following answers are based on my experience (from my experiments)
Can I swap two drives of same RAID volume ? Yes
Can I move my RAID volume 1 into port 1,2 ? Yes
Can I move any of my RAID volume to a different controller? No
Temporary removing an entire RAID volume from the system will not start to re-sync the volume after reconnected.
Installing a 3rd party hardware RAID controller
When you install a PCIe RAID controller expansion card, System boot time can be surprisingly increased. (In my case performance affected by 10 seconds of delay during POST)
This problem is normal in most cases, when you go for a high density RAID controller (having more SATA or SAS ports). If there are around 8 SATA ports motherboard chipset first pass the control to the PCIe SATA controller to detect connected devices and it is normal to consume some time. This delay can be minimized based on the motherboard hardware compatibility, processor architecture (generation) and PCIe RAID controller chipset.
Most of best RAID controllers embedded with Marvel chipset as the controller. My RAID card was also a Marvel controller. It is OK to bare the POST delay of 10 seconds when comparing the advantage of having additional 8 SATA ports. (Asus H97plus comes with 6 internal sata ports, when you utilize 4 of them for hardware RAID volumes, it remains only 2 ports. If you have a plan to upgrade the system with a super speed NVMe SSD, then there will be no additional SATA ports for other devices like Blue ray writter, DVD writter because remaining 2 ports will also be disabled and bandwith will be shared for M.2 interface).
Worst scenario is, NVMe SSD windows boot time lags around 40–60 seconds when there is a PCIe RAID controller installed. (this delay does not exists for SATA SSD bootable drives)
Best solution is either remove PCIE RAID controller card or install simple PCIe to SATA port riser/multiplexer add on card.
Installing a 3rd party USB 3.0 controller
Main problem is when you install a new USB 3.0 expansion card, all or some of existing onboard USB 3.0 ports will become USB 2.0.
Intel chipset is designed to assign higher priorities for discrete controllers and lower priorities for onboard controllers.
Asus h87Plus comes with 6 USB 3.0 ports in handy. But if you are running out of USB ports, easiest way to solve this is simply using a external USB hub device. Hardware geeks may think this is wasting space and reduce the compactness and power of your desktop workstation. So they will probably go for a PCIe expansion card. Instead of using USB 2.0 ports they prefer installing the most efficient USB 3.0 card that have large number of ports (both internal connectors and external ports)
I have upgraded my system with Renesas USB 3.0 PCIe card. I was using this device without any issue for quite a couple of days. Suddenly I realized all my native 3.0 motherboard USB ports have become 2.0 (they have been downgraded somehow) You can use USB Tree software to investigate USB port behavior.
Once I removed my newly installed PCIe card, all the downgraded USB ports were automatically upgraded back into USB 3.0. Reason can be Haswell architecture. Haswell architecture only supports 6 usb 3.0 ports or 14 total number of usb ports. When you plug usb 3.0 expansion card, motherboard chipset will automatically prioritize and assign new USB 3.0 ports into the processor and downgrade existing onboard USB 3.0 ports in order to maintain the Haswell architecture compatibility.
Shutdown works, Restart and Hibernate fails
This problem arises very rarely and there is a simple solution.
When I installed a NVMe SSD, system worked fine for a couple of days, meanwhile I might change several settings including bios features and there might be couple of windows updates installed. One day I noticed this problem. When I restart or hibernate my PC, system seems doing all the pre tasks in normal way but post tasks are missing or halted. After the system is temporary stopped it should restart step by step. First loading the internal RAID controller option ROM, then showing BIOS options, finally passes the control to the OS.
When restarting system halts, showing a black screen (as by default) and not showing the RAID option ROM or anything. Solution is pretty simple, this issue almost looks like a hardware issue but when I turn off the “fast boot” from the windows power settings, system works fine.
Switching NVMe boot device and SATA boot device
Keeping both NVMe in M.2 slot and SATA SSD in SATA port 5 or 6, It is possible to implement a powerful duel boot system.
May be the same operating system in both SATA SSD and NVMe SSD but differ from usage, both will feel like working with two different workstations.
Typical setting of Asus H87Plus is to disable SATA 5,6 ports and share their bandwidth with M.2 slot whenever you install NVMe drive into M.2 slot. First I was configuring new NVMe by installing windows and programmes then going back to previous windows installation by removing NVMe and after sometime again come back to new windows installation system was so much annoying when doing again and again. I wanted both of old system volume and new volume. Then found a easiest way. While keeping both SATA drive and NVMe drive installed, you can manually assign the prioriy from the UEFI settings. What you have to do is first install SATA bootable SSD into port 5 or 6. Then go to UEFI settings/ Advanced configuration/ PCH storage configuration/ SATA 5.6 and M.2/ set whatever you preferred instead of “Auto”.
Select M.2 for NVMe system bootup and SATA for SATA SSD bootup. So you can take the advantage of UEFI hardware level duel boot configuration. Both of them are completely separated and can be treated like two discrete systems.
