Drivers/Hardware :: Intel RST RAID Driver Causing Disk Errors

I have a PC with Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard. It has Intel chipset and Intel BIOS RAID (RSTe) and 6 SATA ports connected to it. The chipset IDE controller lists in Linux as:

Intel Corporation C600/X79 series chipset SATA RAID Controller (rev 06),
and the PCI ID is:
0104: 8086:2826 (rev 06).

My RAID configuration is 2xOCZ-VERTEX4 256GB SSD's in RAID0, as boot drive (C: drive), and 2 (quite old) WDC WD2500KS 250GB disks in RAID0 for extra storage (games, movies etc) (J: drive).

So yesterday I decided to upgrade my Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 10 Pro. All seemingly went well during the upgrade process, and the system booted fine, and most stuff seemed to work as it should. But after a while when I accessed files on the J: drive I started experiencing random (temporary) freezes.

Then after a while it got more serious and the whole system froze, I had to hit the reset button.

So I rebooted and looked in the event log, I get see tons of errors there saying that the disk has a bad sector.

Then I try using the J-drive again, by viewing some videos there, and it works fine, but after a while there are some freezes and then I see in the event log, that the drive was reset. After this it works again for a while but then another of those resets comes, and freezes everything for a short while (like 30 seconds).

But when I try to copy some large files off the J-drive, another reset comes, and then the event log starts showing a lot of the error messages from before, with "the disk has an bad sector". (I will post screenshots of these errors after I reboot back into Windows).

After this I can't access the J-drive at all, and Windows gives me error messages when I try to.

So, I figure that I might have just got unlucky and the old WDC drive actually developed read errors, although it's strange that it happens exactly when I install Windows 10 (these drives are something like 7 years old).

Well I can't copy the contents off the disk from Windows since it keeps failing as described above, so I boot into Ubuntu Linux from a USB stick, so I can use ntfsclone to image the J-drive to another disk. I start it running expecting that I'll start seeing read errors, but to my surprise there are NONE. It also copies all files off the J-drive without any problems from inside Linux!

So it was after all not the old drive that had failed, but instead Windows 10/Intel had failed me in a big way.

I trawled the web for updated Intel chipset drivers and installed those from the Asus site, but it made no difference at all. I couldn't find any other Intel drivers and when I searched for the RST drivers on Intel's own site, I could only find ones for Windows XP upto Windows 8.1, but none for Windows 10.

For now I'm left with a PC that I can't use, because I can't go back to Windows 7 and Windows 10 is not working with my RAID arrays. I got some spare 2TB disks, and I'm right now copying all the data from the old J-drive (the RAID1 about 500GB) over to this, hopefully I can then work in Win 10, but I am VERY concerned because the same RAID and drivers are used for my master boot drive with the two OCZ SSD's.